Scalable virtual viewpoint image synthesis for multiple camera environments

One of the main aims of emerging audio-visual (AV) applications is to provide interactive navigation within a captured event or scene. This paper presents a view synthesis algorithm that provides a scalable and flexible approach to virtual viewpoint synthesis in multiple camera environments. The multi-view synthesis (MVS) process consists of four different phases that are described in detail: surface identification, surface selection, surface boundary blending and surface reconstruction. MVS view synthesis identifies and selects only the best quality surface areas from the set of available reference images, thereby reducing perceptual errors in virtual view reconstruction. The approach is camera setup independent and scalable as virtual views can be created given 1 to N of the available video inputs. Thus, MVS provides interactive AV applications with a means to handle scenarios where camera inputs increase or decrease over time.