Temporally Consistent Depth Map Estimation for 3D Video Generation and Coding

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for temporally consistent depth map estimation to generate three-dimensional video. The proposed algorithm adaptively computes the matching cost using a temporal weighting function, which is obtained by block-based moving object detection and motion estimation with variable block sizes. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the temporal consistency of the depth video and reduces by about 38% both the flickering artefact in the synthesized view and the number of coding bits for depth video coding.