New method of ray-space interpolation for free viewpoint video

Ray-space representation has superiority in rendering arbitrary viewpoint images of complicated scene in real-time. Ray-space interpolation is one of the key techniques to make ray-space based free viewpoint video (FVV) feasible. This paper presents a directionality based interpolation method for ray-space based FW system. Characteristic pixels near edges or within areas with fine texture are first extracted from sparse ray-space slice, and their directionalities are determined by multi-stage matching technique, so as to speed up the directionality searching and obtain more reliable directionalities. Pixels to be interpolated in dense ray-space slice are linear interpolated according to the directionalities of these characteristic pixels. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves visual quality as well as PSNRs of rendered intermediate viewpoint image greatly.