Investigation of the effect of three-dimensional smoothing on multiview stereo images

Future stereoscopic (3D) systems will become multiview capable to allow for the user to experience a more realistic 3D experience since they will not be limited to one view. This will help to make 3D technology more realistic, however, viewing discomfort will still be an issue. When viewing stereoscopic images, one cause of viewing discomfort can be attributed to the images appearing unnaturally sharp across the entire range of depth. To correct this problem for multiview images, a 3D filtering approach is proposed that will reduce the computation time required since the filter need only be applied once, whereas conventional 2D filtering techniques would be required to be performed 2n times (where n is the number of views). After conducting an initial experiment on 15 people, the proposed filter (on average) received similar ratings for discomfort and naturalness, when compared to the well established 2D bilateral filters. The benefit of this work is that it can provide an alternative method for filtering multiview images at a low cost, while obtaining similar results to bilateral filters, making it a useful filter for a wide range of future multiview stereo systems/applications.