Depth Patch Selection for Decoder-Side Depth Estimation in MPEG Immersive Video

The MPEG immersive video (MIV) standard has been developed to efficiently compress volumetric video content and enable an immersive user experience. MIV deals with an enormous amount of data that comes in the form of multi-view plus depth videos, which is efficiently reduced in the process of pruning, by tackling the redundancies among the views. This paper presents a novel approach for improving the existing immersive video coding scheme. The proposed approach reduces the amount of transmitted depth data, leveraging the fact that the depth information is partially contained in texture videos. The study proposes a method that ensures a reliable recovery of depths at the decoder-side. This method provides BD-rate improvements on both high and low bitrate ranges, with up to 22.57% Y-PSNR, 25.76%VMAF, 24.07% MS-SSIM, and 22.94% IV-PSNR metric gain, given a low bitrate setting.