Joint texture-depth pixel inpainting of disocclusion holes in virtual view synthesis

Transmitting texture and depth maps from one or more reference views enables a user to freely choose virtual viewpoints from which to synthesize images for observation via depth-image-based rendering (DIBR). In each DIBR-synthesized image, however, there remain disocclusion holes with missing pixels corresponding to spatial regions occluded from view in the reference images. To complete these holes, unlike previous schemes that rely heavily (and unrealistically) on the availability of a high-quality depth map in the virtual view for inpainting of the corresponding texture map, in this paper a new Joint Texture-Depth Inpainting (JTDI) algorithm is proposed that simultaneously fill in missing texture and depth pixels. Specifically, we first use available partial depth information to compute priority terms to identify the next target pixel patch in a disocclusion hole for inpainting. Then, after identifying the best-matched texture patch in the known pixel region via template matching for texture inpainting, the variance of the corresponding depth patch is copied to the target depth patch for depth inpainting. Experimental results show that JTDI outperforms two previous inpainting schemes that either does not use available depth information during inpainting, or depends on the availability of a good depth map at the virtual view for good inpainting performance.