Reference viewpoints selection for multi-view video plus depth coding based on the network bandwidth constraint

In multi-view video plus depth (MVD) coding based free viewpoint video applications, a few reference viewpoints' texture and depth videos should be compressed and transmitted at the server side. At the terminal side, the display view videos could be the decoded reference view videos or the virtual viewpoints' videos which are synthesized by DIBR technology. The entire video quality of all display views are decided by the number of reference viewpoints and the compression distortion of each reference viewpoint's texture and depth videos. This paper studies the impact of the reference viewpoints selection on the entire video quality of all display views. The results show that depending on the available network bandwidth, the MVD coding requires different selections of reference viewpoints to maximize the entire video quality of all display views.