A Depth Video Coding In-Loop Median Filter Based on Joint Weighted Sparse Representation

The existing depth video coding algorithms are generally based on in-loop depth filters, whose performance are unstable and easily affected by the outliers. In this paper, we design a joint weighted sparse representation-based median filter as the in-loop filter in depth video codec. It constructs depth candidate set which contains relevant neighboring depth pixel based on depth and intensity similarity weighted sparse coding, then the median operation is performed on this set to select a neighboring depth pixel as the result of the filtering. The experimental results indicate that the depth bitrate is reduced by about 9% compared with anchor method. It is confirmed that the proposed method is more effective in reducing the required depth bitrates for a given synthesis quality level.