  Depth image based rendering techniques for multiview applications have been
recently introduced for efficient view generation at arbitrary camera
positions. Encoding rate control has thus to consider both texture and depth
data. Due to different structures of depth and texture images and their
different roles on the rendered views, distributing the available bit budget
between them however 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 shift in objects or unexpected patterns at their
boundaries. In this paper, we address the problem of efficient bit allocation
between textures and depth data of multiview video sequences. We adopt a
rate-distortion framework based on a simplified model of depth and texture
images. Our model preserves the main features of depth and texture images.
Unlike most recent solutions, our method permits to avoid rendering at encoding
time for distortion estimation so that the encoding complexity is not
augmented. In addition to this, our model is independent of the underlying
inpainting method that is used at decoder. Experiments confirm our theoretical
results and the efficiency of our rate allocation strategy.
