Depth image based rendering with advanced texture synthesis

In free viewpoint television or 3D video, depth image based rendering (DIBR) is used to generate virtual views based on a textured image and its associated depth information. In doing so, image regions which are occluded in the original view may become visible in the virtual image. One of the main challenges in DIBR is to extrapolate known textures into the disoccluded area without inserting subjective annoyance. In this paper, a new hole filling approach for DIBR using texture synthesis is presented. Initially, the depth map in the virtual view is filled at disoccluded locations. Then, in the textured image, holes of limited spatial extent are closed by solving Laplace equations. Larger disoccluded regions are initialized via median filtering and subsequently refined by patch-based texture synthesis. Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides improved rendering results in comparison to the latest MPEG view synthesis reference software (VSRS) version 3.6.