Title: Direction hole-filling method for a 3D view generator

Authors: Shwu-Huey Yen; Hung-Ying Chai; Jen-Hui Tsao

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, 151 Ying-chuan Road, Tamsui, New Taipei City 25137, Taiwan ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, 151 Ying-chuan Road, Tamsui, New Taipei City 25137, Taiwan ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, 151 Ying-chuan Road, Tamsui, New Taipei City 25137, Taiwan

Abstract: Depth image-based rendering (DIBR) technology is an approach to creating a virtual 3D image from one single 2D image. A desired view can be synthesised at the receiver side using depth images to make transmission and storage efficient. While this technique has many advantages, one of the key challenges is how to fill the holes caused by disocclusion regions and wrong depth values in the warped left/right images. A common means to alleviate the sizes and the number of holes is to smooth the depth image. But smoothing results in geometric distortions and degrades the depth image quality. This study proposes a hole-filling method based on the oriented texture direction. Parallax correction is first implemented to mitigate the wrong depth values. Texture directional information is then probed in the background pixels where holes take place after warping. Next, in the warped image, holes are filled according to their directions. Experimental results showed that this algorithm preserves the depth information and greatly reduces the amount of geometric distortion.

Keywords: depth images; rendering; DIBR; hole filling; 3D images; parallax correction; depth values; disocclusion regions; texture direction; background pixels; warping; warped images; geometric distortion.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2015.071880

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2015 Vol.11 No.2, pp.167 - 175

Received: 26 Oct 2012
Accepted: 10 Dec 2012

Published online: 22 Sep 2015 *

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