Error supression in view synthesis using reliability reasoning for FTV

Abstract

View synthesis using depth maps is a crucial application for Free-viewpoint TV (FTV). In this paper, we propose a novel reliability based view synthesis method using two references and their depth maps. The depth estimation with stereo matching is known to be error-prone, leading to noticeable artifacts in the synthesized new views. In order to provide plausible virtual views for FTV, our focus is on the error suppression for the synthesized view. We innovatively introduce the continuous reliability using error approximation by the reference cross-check. The new view interpolation algorithm is generated with the criterion of Least Sum of Squared Errors (LSSE). Furthermore, the proposed algorithm can be considered as a reliable version of the conventional linear view blending. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework with MPEG standard test sequences. The results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art view interpolation methods both at eliminating artifacts and improving PSNR.