3D Sound Coding Color for the Visually Impaired

Contemporary art is evolving beyond simply looking at works, and the development of various sensory technologies has had a great influence on culture and art. Accordingly, opportunities for the visually impaired to appreciate visual artworks through various senses such as auditory and tactile senses are expanding. However, insufficient sound expression and lack of portability make it less understandable and accessible. This paper attempts to convey a color and depth coding scheme to the visually impaired, based on alternative sensory modalities, such as hearing (by encoding the color and depth information with 3D sounds of audio description) and touch (to be used for interface-triggering information such as color and depth). The proposed color-coding scheme represents light, saturated, and dark colors for red, orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, and purple. The paper’s proposed system can be used for both mobile platforms and 2.5D (relief) models.

A Complexity Reduction Scheme for Depth Coding in 3D-HEVC

3D-high efficiency video coding (3D-HEVC) is the next-generation compression standard for multiview system applications, which has recently been approved by MPEG and VCEG as an extension of HEVC. To improve the compression efficiency of depth map, several compression tools have been developed for a better representation depth edges. These supplementary coding tools together with existing prediction modes can achieve high compression efficiency, but require a very high complexity that restricts the encoders from ongoing application. In this paper, we introduce a fast scheme to reduce complexity of depth coding in inter and intramode prediction procedure. A simulation analysis is performed to study intra and intermode distribution correlations in the depth compression information. Based on that correlation, we exploit two complexity reduction strategies, including early SKIP and adaptive intra prediction selection. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme can achieve a complexity reduction up to 63.0%, without any noticeable loss of compression efficiency.

Fast Depth Intra Mode Decision Based on Mode Analysis in 3D Video Coding

Multiview video plus depth (MVD), which consists of a texture image and its associated depth map, has been introduced as a 3D video format, and 3D video coding, such as 3D-HEVC, was developed to efficiently compress this MVD data. However, this requires high encoding complexity because of the additional depth coding. In particular, intra coding using various prediction modes is very complicated. To reduce the complexity, we propose a fast depth intra mode decision method based on mode analysis. The proposed method adaptively reduces the number of original candidate modes in a mode decision process. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves high performance in terms of the complexity reduction.