An Asymmetric Edge Adaptive Filter for Depth Generation and Hole Filling in 3DTV

An asymmetric edge adaptive filter (AEAF) is proposed in this paper to partially solve two puzzles in 3DTV, i.e. depth generation and hole filling. Different from other similar processing methods, one time of AEAF operation can simultaneously achieve the effect of edge correction and pre-processing of the depth maps. Thus the computing complexity can be greatly reduced. On the one hand, based on the initial depth map obtained by simple algorithms, AEAF can achieve depth maps with comparatively accurate object edges, avoiding high computation after the introduction of depth generation method based on image and video segmentation. On the other hand, AEAF can reduce the area of holes in rendered views via asymmetric smoothing of depth maps, promising an improvement in the image quality with reduced artifacts and distortions. Experiment results in the applications of 2D-to-3D conversion and stereo matching show that a balance point is found by AEAF between the two aspects of the contradiction.