Real-time free-viewpoint viewer from multiview video plus depth representation coded by H.264/AVC MVC extension

This paper presents a real-time video-based rendering system that uses multiview video data with depth representation for free-viewpoint navigation. The proposed rendering algorithm not only achieves high quality rendering but also increases viewpoint flexibility to cover viewpoints that do not lie on the camera baselines. The proposed system achieves real-time decoding of multiple videos and depth maps that are encoded by the H.264/AVC Multiview Video Coding Extension on a regular CPU. The rendering process is fully implemented on a commercial GPU. A performance evaluation shows that our system can generate XGA free-viewpoint images at 30 fps.