Adaptive reconstruction of intermediate views from stereoscopic images

Abstract—This paper deals with disparity estimation and the reconstruction of intermediate views from stereoscopic images. Using block-wise maximum-likelihood (ML) disparity estimation, it was found that the Laplacian model outperformed the Cauchy and Gaussian models in terms of disparity compensation errors and the number of correspondence matches. The disparity values in occluded regions were then determined using both object-based and reliability-based interpolation. Finally, an adaptive technique was used to interpolate the intermediate views. One distinguishing characteristic of this algorithm is that the left and right-eye images were projected onto the plane of the intermediate view to be reconstructed. This resulted in two projected images. The intermediate view was created using a weighted average of these two projected images with the weights based on the quality of the corresponding areas of the projected images. Subjective exami-nation of the reconstructed images indicate that they have high image quality and good stable depth when viewed stereoscopically. An objective evaluation with the test image sequence “Flower Garden ” shows that the proposed algorithm can achieve a peak signal-to-noise ratio gain of around 1 dB, when compared to a reference algorithm. Index Terms—Disparity estimation, intermediate view recon-struction, stereoscopic image, three-dimensional television (3-D TV), virtual viewpoint synthesis. I