Global optimization for spatio-temporally consistent view synthesis

We propose a novel algorithm to generate a virtual-view video from a video-plus-depth sequence. The proposed method enforces the spatial and temporal consistency in the disocclusion regions by formulating the problem as an energy minimization problem in a Markov random field (MRF) framework. In the system level, we first recover the depth images and the motion vector maps after the image warping with the preprocessed depth map. Then we formulate the energy function for the MRF with additional shift variables for each node. To reduce the high computational complexity of applying BP to this problem, we present a multi-level BPs by using BP with smaller numbers of label candidates for each level. Finally, the Poisson image reconstruction is applied to improve the color consistency along the boundary of the disocclusion region in the synthesized image. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed method on several publicly available datasets.