GPU-accelerated depth codec for real-time, high-quality light field reconstruction

Koniaris, Babis; Kosek, Maggie; Sinclair, David; Mitchell, Kenny

Abstract

Pre-calculated depth information is essential for efficient light field video rendering, due to the prohibitive cost of depth estimation from color when real-time performance is desired. Standard state-of-the-art video codecs fail to satisfy such performance requirements when the amount of data to be decoded becomes too large. In this paper, we propose a depth image and video codec based on block compression, that exploits typical characteristics of depth streams, drawing inspiration from S3TC texture compression and geometric wavelets. Our codec offers very fast hardware-accelerated decoding that also allows partial extraction for view-dependent decoding. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our codec in a number of multi-view 360-degree video datasets, with quantitative analysis of storage cost, reconstruction quality, and decoding performance.

Citation

Koniaris, B., Kosek, M., Sinclair, D., & Mitchell, K. (2018). GPU-accelerated depth codec for real-time, high-quality light field reconstruction. Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 1(1), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3203193

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Conference Name: ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (i3D) 2018
• Acceptance Date: Mar 19, 2018
• Publication Date: Jul 25, 2018
• Deposit Date: Dec 4, 2018
• Journal: Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
• Print ISSN: 2577-6193
• Electronic ISSN: 2577-6193
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 1-15
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3203193
• Keywords: depth image based rendering, compression, light field rendering,
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1413540