GPU-accelerated depth codec for real-time, high-quality light field reconstruction

Pre-calculated depth information is essential for efficient light field video rendering, due to the prohibitive cost of depth estimation from color when real-time performance is desired. Standard state-of-the-art video codecs fail to satisfy such performance requirements when the amount of data to be decoded becomes too large. In this paper, we propose a depth image and video codec based on block compression, that exploits typical characteristics of depth streams, drawing inspiration from S3TC texture compr