A new multidirectional extrapolation hole-filling method for depth-image-based rendering

Depth-Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) is widely used to generate virtual view of a scene from a known view with associated depth map in 3D video applications. However, disocclusion arises in image warping of DIBR. Many hole-filling methods have been proposed such as constant color, horizontal interpolation, horizontal extrapolation, and variational inpainting, but they cause different types of annoying artifact for large holes with complex texture background. In this paper, a novel multidirectional extrapolation hole-filling method is proposed to enhance visual quality for large hole-filling with complex texture background. The proposed method uses neighbor pixels' texture features to estimate hole-filling direction in a pixel-by-pixel manner. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method could provide better visual quality compared with conventional methods for virtual views synthesis with high-quality depth map. ? 2011 IEEE.EI