Depth map compression

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Hi,

I'm trying to compress a depth map stream from the Kinect sensor. The requirements is that at 10fps, the uplink should be approx. 1.5 Mbit/s which is most ordinary people have at home (granted, depending on the location). I've tried plain bz2'ing the depth map (~50kb each) and recording the depth map as a smooth gradient in the RGB space and doing plain video compression on it. With ffmpeg lossless compression it's still prohibitively big, but it seemed to get there with lossy compression. Of course it depends on how lossy.

Is there anyone who looked into this? Note that I'm not handling point clouds or tracking the camera position. Anyone experimented with lossy compression rates?

Are there other ways of doing this? The choice of language is C++.