A depth refinement algorithm for multi-view video synthesis

With the recent progress of display, capture device, and coding technologies, multi-view video applications such as stereoscopic video, free viewpoint TV (FTV), and free viewpoint video (FVV) have been introduced to the world with growing interest. To achieve free navigation of such applications, depth information is required along with the video data. There have been many research activities in the area of depth estimation; however, it still poses us great challenge to estimate accurate depth map. In this paper, we propose a depth refinement algorithm for multi-view video synthesis. The proposed algorithm classifies the pixel-wise depth map into two categories, one is reliable and the other is unreliable, followed by the depth refinement algorithm for those pixels with unreliable depth values. Except for the depth refinement algorithm, we also propose a reliable weighted view interpolation algorithm. At last, the refined depth map is evaluated by the quality of the synthesized view.