Hierarchical Hole-Filling For Depth-Based View Synthesis in FTV and 3D Video

Three-dimensional television (3DTV) is believed to be the future of television broadcasting that would replace current 2D HDTV technology. Future 3DTV would bring a more life-like and visually immersive home entertainment experience, in which users will have the freedom to navigate through the scene to choose a different viewpoint. A desired view can be synthesized at the receiver side using depth image-based rendering (DIBR). While this approach has many advantages, one of the key challenges in DIBR is how to fill the holes caused by disocclusion regions and wrong depth values. In this paper, we propose two new approaches for disocclusion removal in DIBR. Both approaches namely hierarchical hole-filling (HHF) and depth adaptive hierarchical hole-filling eliminate the need for any smoothing or filtering of the depth map. Both techniques use a pyramid-like approach to estimate the hole pixels from lower resolution estimates of the 3D wrapped image. The lower resolution estimates involve a pseudo zero canceling plus Gaussian filtering of the wrapped image. The depth adaptive HHF incorporates the depth information to produce a higher resolution rendering around previously occluded areas. Experimental results show that HHF and depth adaptive HHF yield virtual images and stereoscopic videos that are free of geometric distortions and a better rendering quality both subjectively and objectively than traditional hole-filling approaches.