Efficient stereo-to-multiview synthesis

From a rectified stereo image pair, the task of view synthesis is to generate images from any viewpoint along the baseline. The main difficulty of the problem is how to fill occluded regions. In this pa per, we present a new method for view synthesis that is both fast and accurate. Occlusions are filled using color and disparity information to produce consistent pixel estimates. Results are comparable to current state-of-the-art methods in terms of objective measures while computation time is drastically reduced. This work has applications in free-viewpoint television, angular scalability for 3D video coding/decoding, and stereo-to-multiview conversion.