Quality enhancement of quality-asymmetric multiview plus depth video by using virtual view

Currently, multiview video plus depth format is one of the most popular 3D data representations which enables to generate any required intermediate view in a certain range. However, in terms of encoding and decoding complexity and transmission bandwidth, it requires much more than the conventional 2D video or stereo video. Based on the binocular suppression theory, quality-asymmetric video in multiview system can alleviate this problem by using different coding qualities for different views. However, in order to reduce visual uncomfortableness and to make this video format more suitable for free-viewpoint television, the low quality views have to be improved to match the high quality ones. Hence, in this work we propose to enhance the low quality views in quality-asymmetric multiview video plus depth system by exploiting inter-view correlation to compensate compression distortion. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with an enhanced PSNR gain for the LQ view of up to 2.48dB and for the enhanced asymmetric coding quality over the symmetric coding quality of up to 1.21dB.