Six-dimensional free-viewpoint synthesis flow for QFHD free-viewpoint/multiview 3DTV applications

Multiview video (MVV) can provide viewers a complete 3D perception by its multiple-viewpoint feature. In order to support smooth viewpoint switching, virtual view synthesis is required. However the ultra high computational complexity and the system memory bandwidth requirement make the real-time multiview applications difficult. For the quad full-HD (QFHD) specification, 31.5GByte/Sec is needed for every virtual view. Furthermore, the conventional line buffer based or block based data scheduling cannot support the various geometries required in the virtual view synthesis. In the paper, a six-dimensional free-viewpoint view synthesis flow is proposed. By the proposed texture reorder and inverse reorder data interface, the on-chip data scheduling can be done under the conventional block pipelining even with different geometries. After integrating the proposed bandwidth reduction schemes, including the dynamic warping reference frame selection and on-chip texture buffer optimization, 95.7% system memory bandwidth is saved. Comparing with the previous 1D-horizontal-shifting-based 3DTV chips, the proposed scheduling provides full geometries including translations and rotations in the 3D space.