Effective interpolation for free viewpoint images using multi-layered dynamic background buffers

Abstract

Presenting images from a free viewpoint is a promising interactive video application. Though reference images from one viewpoint and their depth maps are often used to render free viewpoint images, picture quality degradation may occur because of lack of information in background regions that are occluded by foreground regions. In this paper an interpolation method for free viewpoint images using multilayered dynamic background buffers is proposed. In the proposed method, the buffers, updated using the reference images divided in each frame, are used to store the background regions and the output images are interpolated by the background buffers. Since the background buffers are created and updated using only the reference images and their depth maps, additional information on the background buffers is not required for the interpolation. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated by several simulation experiments.