Digital Reality Lab

 
[Adapting Standard Video Codecs for Depth Streaming]

Adapting Standard Video Codecs for Depth Streaming

Fabrizio Pece,  Jan Kautz,  Tim Weyrich

University College London

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.

Citation Style:    Publication

Adapting Standard Video Codecs for Depth Streaming.
Fabrizio Pece, Jan Kautz, Tim Weyrich.
In Proc. of Joint Virtual Reality Conference of EuroVR (JVRC), pp. 1–8, Nottingham, UK, Sep 2011.Fabricio Pece, Jan Kautz, and Tim Weyrich. Adapting standard video codecs for depth streaming. In Proc. of Joint Virtual Reality Conference of EuroVR (JVRC), pages 1–8, September 2011.Pece, F., Kautz, J., and Weyrich, T. 2011. Adapting standard video codecs for depth streaming. In Proc. of Joint Virtual Reality Conference of EuroVR (JVRC), 1–8.F. Pece, J. Kautz, and T. Weyrich, “Adapting standard video codecs for depth streaming,” in Proc. of Joint Virtual Reality Conference of EuroVR (JVRC), Sep. 2011, pp. 1–8.
thumbnailPDF (12 MB)
BibTeXBibTeXBibTeX

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the FP7 EU collaborative project BEAMING (248620)


Privacy: This page is free of cookies or any means of data collection. Copyright disclaimer: The documents contained in these pages are included to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.