Improved View Synthesis with Depth Reliability Maps

An improved view interpolation scheme with depth reliability maps is presented to enhance the quality of synthesized images in this paper. First of all, the left depth map and the right one can be estimated by a graph cut approach from the input reference images. Then, the predict depth maps are derived by forward mapping, and then a median filter is applied to eliminate small blank points caused by forward mapping. Next, the left predict image and the right one are synthesized by reverse mapping using the reference image with the associated predict depth map. After that, in order to obtain better visual quality, the post-processing operations are developed. On the one hand, the segmentation mask can be derived from the depth reliability maps, which are produced from the depth maps. On the other hand, based on the segmentation mask, a virtual view image is generated by a weighted interpolation scheme from the left and right predict images.