Bi-layer inpainting for novel view synthesis

We present a bi-layer inpainting method for synthesizing novel views from a single color image and its corresponding depth map under the exemplar-based inpainting framework. Unlike conventional image inpainting, the decisions of the inpainting direction and the sample regions are important to inpaint disoccluded regions which disclose hidden background regions in the new viewpoint. The proposed algorithm first labels boundaries along the disoccluded regions whether it belongs to the foreground or background objects, and then separates their surrounding regions into the foreground and background regions using the graph cut algorithm. The disoccluded regions are then filled from the background boundary with best-match patches taken from the background regions. As demonstrated in the experimental results, the proposed method recovers the disoccluded region with visually plausible quality.