Improvements of interpolation and extrapolation view synthesis rendering for 3D and multiview displays

To display video content in 3D, traditional stereoscopic televisions require two views of the same scene filmed at a small distance from one another. Unfortunately, having the required number of views is not always possible due to the complexity of obtaining them and the required bandwidth for transmission. In cases where more advanced auto-stereoscopic televisions require more than two views, the issue of obtaining and transmitting those additional views becomes even more complex. These issues led to the idea of having a small number of real views and their corresponding depth-maps, showing the distance of each object from the viewing plane, which together can be used to generate virtual intermediate views. These virtual synthesized views are generated by moving different objects in the real views a specific amount of pixels based on their distance from the viewing plane. The need for synthesizing virtual views is more pronounced with the introduction of stereoscopic and autostreoscopic (multiview) displays to the consumer market. In this case, as it is not practical to capture all the required views for different multiview display technologies, a limited number of views are captured and the remaining views are synthesized using the available views. View synthesis is also important in converting existing 2D content to 3D, a development that is necessary in the quest for 3D content which has been deemed a vital factor for faster adoption of the 3D technology. In this thesis a new hybrid approach for synthesizing views for stereoscopic and multiview applications is presented. This approach utilizes a unique and effective hole filling method that generates high quality 3D content. First, we present a new method for view interpolation where missing-texture areas are filled with data from the other available view and a unique warping approach that stretches background objects to fill in these areas. Second, a view extrapolation method is proposed where small areas of the image are filled using nearest-neighbor interpolation and larger areas are filled with the same unique image warping approach. Subjective evaluations confirm that this approach outperforms current state-of-the-art pixel interpolation-based as well as existing warping-based techniques.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofGraduat