MPEG-I Depth Estimation Reference Software

Abstract

For enabling virtual reality on natural content, Depth Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) techniques have been steadily developed over the past decade, but their quality highly depends on that of the depth estimation. This paper is an attempt to deliver good-quality Depth Estimation Reference Software (DERS) that is well-structured for further use in the worldwide MPEG standardization committee. The existing DERS has been refactored, debugged and extended to any number of input views for generating accurate depth maps. Their quality has been validated by synthesizing DIBR virtual views with the Reference View Synthesizer (RVS) and the Versatile View Synthesizer (VVS), using the available MPEG test sequences. Resulting images and runtimes are reported.

Light Field Rendering for non-Lambertian Objects

“…The Immersive sub-community of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG-I, developing standards for immersive video compression) divides DIBR in two steps after the cameras calibration: 1) depth estimation and 2) rendering. MPEG-I provides two reference software for those steps [12,27]. For natural scenes, the depth map can be acquired with a depth sensing device [40] or by computing the disparity between the input viewpoints [27].…”

“…MPEG-I provides two reference software for those steps [12,27]. For natural scenes, the depth map can be acquired with a depth sensing device [40] or by computing the disparity between the input viewpoints [27]. Once the depth map is estimated for each input image, the color pixels of each view are displaced,using this depth map, to the location of the target view [30,12].…”

GoRG: Towards a GPU-Accelerated Multiview Hyperspectral Depth Estimation Tool for Medical Applications

“…Considered the algorithm with the best quality depth map generation, graph cuts were implemented in DERS to fulfill the quality requirements of immersive video applications. The quality and processing time needed by this software were studied in another work [31], showing that for generating these highly detailed depth maps, the processing time needed oscillates between hundred and thousand of seconds. Therefore, although DERS can be considered a higher bound in depth map quality, its high processing time forces its use offline.…”

“…MPEG DERS [31] has been the reference software for depth estimation in MPEG-I for several years. Its use is mainly focused on the generation of high-quality depth maps for immersive video applications using YUV images as input without considering the processing time needed.…”

Computer Generated Holography with Depth-based View Synthesis

“…We have used the MPEG-I Visual Depth Estimation Reference Software (DERS) based on graph cut [10,11], which has been improved to yield view-consistent depth maps with temporal consistency (for video) [12], cf. the visual example in [13].…”