Disparity Estimation and Virtual View Synthesis from Stereo Video

A new scheme for disparity vector (DV) estimation and virtual view synthesis to generate 3-D video display from a pair of stereo video inputs is investigated in this work. Two performance metrics are considered for the algorithmic evaluation; i.e. quality and complexity. To enhance the overall performance, a two-stage algorithm for accurate and fast DV estimation and occlusion handling is first presented. Then, a preprocessing algorithm and a synthesis method are described. The proposed preprocessing algorithm can remove false matched regions for DV refinement effectively. The new synthesis method can reduce blurring and ghostly effects greatly. It is demonstrated by experimental results that the proposed algorithm offers better virtual view quality at a much lower complexity than existing methods.