Adapting Standard Video Codecs for Depth Streaming

Pece, Fabrizio; Kautz, Jan; Weyrich, Tim

Adapting Standard Video Codecs for Depth Streaming

Files

059-066.pdf (3.17 MB)

Date

2011

Authors

Pece, Fabrizio
Kautz, Jan
Weyrich, Tim

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

Cameras that can acquire a continuous stream of depth images are now commonly available, for instance the Microsoft Kinect. It may seem that one should be able to stream these depth videos using standard video codecs, such as VP8 or H.264. However, the quality degrades considerably as the compression algorithms are geared towards standard three-channel (8-bit) colour video, whereas depth videos are single-channel but have a higher bit depth.We present a novel encoding scheme that efficiently converts the single-channel depth images to standard 8-bit three-channel images, which can then be streamed using standard codecs. Our encoding scheme ensures that the compression affects the depth values as little as possible. We show results obtained using two common video encoders (VP8 and H.264) as well as the results obtained when using JPEG compression. The results indicate that our encoding scheme performs much better than simpler methods

        @inproceedings{10.2312:EGVE/JVRC11/059-066
,
booktitle = {Joint Virtual Reality Conference of EGVE - EuroVR
},
editor = {Sabine Coquillart and Anthony Steed and Greg Welch
},
title = {{Adapting Standard Video Codecs for Depth Streaming
}},
author = {Pece, Fabrizio and 
Kautz, Jan and 
Weyrich, Tim
},
year = {2011
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-530X
},
ISBN = {978-3-905674-33-0
},
DOI = {10.2312/EGVE/JVRC11/059-066
}
}