Planelets—A Piecewise Linear Fractional Model for Preserving Scene Geometry in Intra-Coding of Indoor Depth Images

Geometrical wavelets have already proved their strength in approximation, compression, and denoising of piecewise constant and piecewise linear images. In this paper, we extend this family by introducing planelets toward an effective representation of indoor depth images. It uses a linear fractional model to capture non-linearity of depth values in the planar regions of the output images of Kinect-like sensors. A block-based compression framework based on planelet approximation is then presented, which uses quadtree decomposition along with spatial predictions as an effective intra-coding scheme. Compared with both classical geometric wavelets and some state-of-the-art image coding algorithms, our method provides desirable quality by explicitly representing edges and planar patches.