Precision Enhancement of 3-D Surfaces from Compressed Multiview Depth Maps

Transmitting depth maps captured from multiple viewpoints of a 3-D scene enables a wide range of receiver-side 3-D applications, including virtual view synthesis via depth-image-based rendering (DIBR). Observing that compressed depth maps from different viewpoints constitute multiple descriptions (MD) of the same signal, we propose to reconstruct 3-D surfaces of the scene by considering multiple compressed depth maps jointly. Specifically, we propose an alternating projection algorithm, inspired by the theory of projection onto convex sets (POCS), which at convergence returns a 3-D surface that satisfies three sets of conditions: spatial smoothness prior, quantization bin constraints in the block transform domain, and inter-view consistency. We present a theoretical proof that shows convergence of our algorithm under benign conditions. Compared to existing multiview depth map denoising schemes and single image de-quantization schemes, our proposed solution achieves higher objective quality for both reconstructed depth maps and synthesized virtual views.