Bilateral depth-discontinuity filter for novel view synthesis

In this paper, a new filtering technique addresses the disocclusions problem issued from the depth image based rendering (DIBR) technique within 3DTV framework. An inherent problem with DIBR is to fill in the newly exposed areas (holes) caused by the image warping process. In opposition with multiview video (MVV) systems, such as free viewpoint television (FTV), where multiple reference views are used for recovering the disocclusions, we consider in this paper a 3DTV system based on a video-plus-depth sequence which provides only one reference view of the scene. To overcome this issue, disocclusion removal can be achieved by pre-processing the depth video and/or post-processing the warped image through hole-filling techniques. Specifically, we propose in this paper a pre-processing of the depth video based on a bilateral filtering according to the strength of the depth discontinuity. Experimental results are shown to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method compared to the traditional methods.