Statistical methods for inter-viewdepth enhancement

This paper briefly presents and evaluates recent advances in statistical methods for improving inter-view inconsistency in multiview depth imagery. View synthesis is vital in free-viewpoint television in order to allow viewers to move freely in a dynamic scene. Here, depth image-based rendering plays a pivotal role by synthesizing an arbitrary number of novel views by using a subset of captured views and corresponding depth maps only. Usually, each depth map is estimated individually at different viewpoints by stereo matching and, hence, shows lack of inter-view consistency. This lack of consistency affects the quality of view synthesis negatively. This paper discusses two different approaches to enhance the inter-view depth consistency. The first one uses generative models based on multiview color and depth classification to assign a probabilistic weight to each depth pixel. The weighted depth pixels are utilized to enhance depth maps. The second one performs inter-view consistency testing in depth difference space to enhance the depth maps at multiple viewpoints. We comparatively evaluate these two methods and discuss their pros and cons for future work.