Bayesian winner-take-all reconstruction of intermediate views from stereoscopic images

This paper presents a new algorithm for the reconstruction of intermediate views from a pair of still stereoscopic images. The algorithm is designed to address the issue of blur caused by linear filtering often employed in such reconstruction. The proposed algorithm is block-based and to reconstruct the intermediate views employs nonlinear disparity-compensated filtering by means of a winner-take-all strategy. The reconstructed image is modeled as a tiling by fixed-size blocks coming from various positions (disparity compensation) of either the left or right images, while the tiling map itself is modeled by a binary decision field. In addition to that, an observation model relating the left and right images via a disparity field, and a disparity field model are used. All models are probabilistic and are combined into a maximum a posteriori probability criterion. The intermediate intensities, disparities and the binary decision field are estimated jointly using the expectation-maximization algorithm. The new approach is compared experimentally on complex natural images with a reference block-based algorithm employing linear filtering. Although the improvements are localized and often subtle, they demonstrate that a high-quality intermediate view reconstruction for complex scenes is feasible.