Depth image-based rendering techniques for multiview applications have been recently introduced for efficient view generation at arbitrary camera positions. The rate control in an encoder has thus to consider both texture and depth data. However, due to different structures of depth and texture data and their different roles on the rendered views, the allocation of the available bit budget between them requires a careful analysis. Information loss due to texture coding affects the value of pixels in synthesized views, while errors in depth information lead to a shift in objects or to unexpected patterns at their boundaries.In this paper, we address the problem of efficient bit allocation between texture and depth data of multiview sequences.We adopt a rate-distortion framework based on a simplified model of depth and texture images, which preserves the main features of depth and texture images. Unlike most recent solutions, our method avoids rendering at encoding time for distortion estimation so that the encoding complexity stays low. In addition to this, our model is independent of the underlying inpainting method that is used at the decoder for filling holes in the synthetic views. Extensive experiments validate our theoretical results and confirm the efficiency of our rate allocation strategy.

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