An Improved Depth Image Based Virtual View Synthesis Method for Interactive 3D Video

Depth image-based rendering (DIBR) is one of the main techniques in interactive 3D video systems. But a critical problem of DIBR is that how to eliminate the holes appearing in virtual view images. In this paper, an improved depth image based virtual view synthesis algorithm is proposed. In depth map pre-processing, only local areas of the depth map with sudden changes are pre-processed by the asymmetric filter. After this, we combine the forward and inverse 3D-warping to synthesize the virtual view. Firstly, it warps the left image to the virtual view and then only reversely warps the region of the holes in the virtual view to the right view to get the lost information of holes. Compared with the traditional method which have to warp the two whole images, computation cost can be reduced by 30% efficiently. Finally, we employ an improved image inpainting based on depth information to fill hole regions. We have improved the method in two portions: 1) depth information is added to the priority computation and searching the best matching patch and 2) as the filling proceeds, the confidence term of the newly inpainted pixels is updated with the mean square error (MSE) of pixels in the target matching patch and the source matching patch. Experimental results show significant objective and subjective gains of the proposed method in comparison to the reference methods.