There are monocular depth cues present in images or videos that aid in depth perception in two-dimensional images or videos. Our objective is to preserve the defocus depth cue present in the videos along with the salient regions during compression application. A method is provided for opportunistic bit allocation during the video compression using visual saliency information comprising both the image features, such as color and contrast, and the defocus-based depth cue. The method is divided into two steps: saliency computation followed by compression. A nonlinear method is used to combine pure and defocus saliency maps to form the final saliency map. Then quantization values are assigned on the basis of these saliency values over a frame. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme yields good results over standard H.264 compression as well as pure and defocus saliency methods. © 2016 SPIE and IS&T.