Methods, device and data stream are provided to encode unaligned multi-view plus depth images associated with assistance metadata for generating depth maps aligned with the unaligned color views. At the encoding stage, for an unaligned color view, the contribution of each depth map is evaluated. A subset of the most contributing depth maps is selected and metadata representative of this subset is encoded in the data stream of the unaligned multi-view plus depth images in association with the unaligned color view. At the decoding stage, to generate a depth map unaligned with the unaligned color view, only the depth maps referenced in the assistance metadata are warped.