Disparity estimation for the intermediate view interpolation of stereoscopic images

The paper presents a disparity estimation method that combines a phase-based disparity estimation algorithm with an energy-based variational refinement approach, and adapts the method for the application of intermediate view interpolation. The Gabor transform is implemented using a set of quadrature-pair filters for finding the local phase information as well as for estimating the correspondences in stereo pairs. Then the estimated coarse disparity is applied to the variational refinement process which involves solving a partial differential equation (PDE) associated with an edge-preserving regularization functional. Two stereo image pairs in which the original intermediate images are available were used to test the algorithm, where our interpolated intermediate images could be compared with the originals. The performance with PSNR results shows that our method can provide very good images without introducing obvious artifacts.