View synthesis using foreground object extraction for disparity control and image inpainting

Abstract Among the rapidly growing three-dimensional technologies, multiview displays have drawn great research interests in three-dimensional television due to their adaption to the motion parallax and wider viewing angles. However, multiview displays still suffer from dazzling discomfort on the border of viewing zones. Leveraging on the separability of scene via foreground segmentation, we propose a novel virtual view synthesis method for depth-image-based rendering to alleviate the discomfort. Foreground objects of interest are extracted to segment the whole image into multiple layers, which are further warped to the virtual viewpoint in order. To alleviate the visual discomfort, global disparity adjustments and local depth control are performed for specific objects in each layer. For the post-processing, we improve an exemplar-based inpainting algorithm to tackle the disoccluded areas. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves effective disparity control and generates high-quality virtual view images.