K. Müller, A. Smolic, K. Dix, P. Merkle, P. Kauff, and T. Wiegand, “View Synthesis for Advanced 3D Video Systems”, EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing, 2009.

Abstract: The paper is about 3D video applications and systems based on multiview autostereoscopic displays. These are expected to play an important role in home user environments, since they support multi-user 3D sensation and motion parallax impression. The tremendous data rate cannot be handled efficiently by representation and coding formats such as MVC or MPEG-C Part 3. Multiview video plus depth is a new format that efficiently supports such advanced 3DV systems, but this requires high quality intermediate view synthesis. For this, a new approach is presented that separates unreliable image regions along depth discontinuities from reliable image regions, which are treated separately and fused to the final interpolated view. In contrast to previous layered approaches, our algorithm uses two boundary layers and one reliable layer, performs image-based 3D warping only and was generically implemented, i.e. doesn’t necessarily rely on 3D graphics support. Furthermore, different hole-filling and filtering methods are added to provide high-quality intermediate views. As a result, high quality intermediate views for an existing 9-view auto-stereoscopic display as well as other stereo- and multiscopic displays are presented, which prove the suitability of our approach for advanced 3DV systems.