Spatially consistent view synthesis with coordinate alignment

In this paper, we propose a novel method that uses coordinate alignment and background pixel extraction to synthesize highly accurate and spatially consistent intermediate views from a pair of stereo images and disparity maps. In contrast to the traditional depth image-based rendering (DIBR) method, where useful background pixels are discarded in the warping process, the proposed method extracts these background pixels and uses them as candidates for an exemplar-based image in-painting technique (EBIIT) to synthesize realistic content in disocclusion regions. Our second contribution is a coordinate alignment algorithm that aligns disocclusion regions in each view together and simultaneously synthesizes disocclusion regions to enhance spatial consistency across all virtual views. The proposed method compares favorably in quantitative measures to those obtained by existing techniques and has superior potential for stereo-to-multiview conversion.