Error compensation and reliability based view synthesis

View synthesis offers a great flexibility in generating free viewpoint television (FTV) and 3D video (3DV). However, the depth-image-based view synthesis approach is very sensitive to errors in the camera parameters or poorly estimated depth maps (also called depth images). Because of these errors, three kinds of artifacts (blurring, contour, hole) are possibly introduced during the general synthesis process. Comparing to conventional methods which implement the view synthesis only in ideal case, in this paper, we propose to design an error compensation and reliability based view synthesis system where the potential errors are considered. The main contributions are highlighted as follows: Firstly, the camera parameter errors are compensated by a global homography transformation matrix. Secondly, the depth maps are classified into both reliable and unreliable regions and the reliability based weighting masks are built to blend synthesized images from two different views together. Finally, a reliability depth map based hole-filling technique is used to fill the existing holes. The experimental results demonstrate that these artifacts are efficiently reduced in the synthesized images.