Information Fusion based Quality Enhancement for 3D Stereo Images Using CNN

Stereo images provide users with a vivid 3D watching experience. Supported by per-view depth maps, 3D stereo images can be used to generate any required intermediate view between the given left and right stereo views. However, 3D stereo images lead to higher transmission and storage cost compared to single view images. Based on the binocular suppression theory, mixed-quality stereo images can alleviate this problem by employing different compression ratios on the two views. This causes noticeable visual artifacts when a high compression ratio is adopted and limits free-viewpoint applications. Hence, the low quality image at the receiver side needs to be enhanced to match the high quality one. To address this problem, in this paper we propose an end-to-end fully Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for enhancing the low quality images in quality asymmetric stereo images by exploiting inter-view correlation. The proposed network achieves an image quality boost of up to 4.6dB and 3.88dB PSNR gain over ordinary JPEG for QF10 and 20, respectively, and an improvement of up to 2.37dB and 2.05dB over the state-of-the-art CNN-based results for QF10 and 20, respectively.