Combined hole-filling with spatial and temporal prediction

A combined hole-filling approach with spatial and temporal prediction is presented in this paper. Depth image-based rendering (DIBR) is generally used to synthesize virtual view images in free viewpoint television (FTV) and three-dimensional (3-D) video. Limited original camera views and depth maps are used to generate the additional virtual views in the synthesizing process. One of the main problems in DIBR is that there are some regions are occluded by the foreground objects in the original views, and they will be some holes in the generated additional virtual views, especially for the view extrapolation cases. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is introduced and it can be used to fill the holes which caused by disocclusion regions and inaccurate depth values. The proposed algorithm combines the spatial and temporal prediction, and the performance is much better and more stable than the previous work. The experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the quality of the virtual views a lot compared with the previous work. The improvement is not only obvious in the objective comparison, but also in the subjective comparison.