Efficient stereo disparity estimation for intermediate view synthesis

An efficient algorithm addressing robust disparity estimation for intermediate view synthesis is proposed. In the proposed method, a new adaptive-size window approach based on region information is introduced to stereo matching in order to overcome problems with fixed-size window. Dynamic programming (DP) technique is used to find optimized disparity values. The reliability of disparity estimation is then measured with a criterion based on uniqueness and smoothness constrains. In occluded areas and image points with unreliable disparity assignments, region-based interpolation strategy is applied to compensate the disparity values. After projecting the left to right and right to left disparities onto the intermediate image, an arbitrary intermediate view is synthesized. Experimental results with natural stereo pairs show that the proposed algorithms provide good disparity map and obtain the intermediate views with high quality.