Generation of virtual intermediate views in object-based stereo video coding

A new approach to generating virtual intermediate views for stereo videoconferencing system is presented in this paper, including extraction of stereo video objects, estimation of disparity field, and generation of virtual intermediate views. A scheme of extraction of stereo video object is first given, an adaptive multi-level disparity estimation algorithm based on characteristic disparity vectors is proposed. Then, an arbitrary intermediate disparity field is obtained with disparity interpolation and the corresponding virtual intermediate view is generated. Experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient to generate virtual intermediate views.