DEPTH-IMAGE REPRESENTATION EMPLOYING MESHES FOR INTERMEDIATE-VIEW RENDERING AND CODING

A common way to represent 3-D images is to send the textureimage together with a corresponding depth-image. This paper presents a depth-image representation employing triangular meshes to benefit both in obtaining higher compression factors and directly enabling fast intermediate-view rendering on commodity graphics hardware. Previous mesh-based representations did not consider the fact that assigning wrong depth values along object boundaries results in well-observable artifacts in the intermediate-view rendering. We solve this problem by assigning two depth values per node to better model sharp depth discontinuities. Furthermore, we ensure that meshedges are placed along object borders, preventing that triangles span background as well as objects at the same time. The results show good intermediate-view rendering quality, object/background separation, and good rate-distortion performance up to about 40 dB PSNR at a bit rate of 0.05 bits/pixel. Index Terms — mesh generation, image coding, stereo vision, three-dimensional displays. 1