2D-to-3D Conversion System using Depth Map Enhancement

This study introduces an image-based 2D-to-3D conversion system that provides significant stereoscopic visual effects for humans. The linear and atmospheric perspective cues that compensate each other are employed to estimate depth information. Rather than retrieving a precise depth value for pixels from the depth cues, a direction angle of the image is estimated and then the depth gradient, in accordance with the direction angle, is integrated with superpixels to obtain the depth map. However, stereoscopic effects of synthesized views obtained from this depth map are limited and dissatisfy viewers. To obtain impressive visual effects, the viewer’s main focus is considered, and thus salient object detection is performed to explore the significance region for visual attention. Then, the depth map is refined by locally modifying the depth values within the significance region. The refinement process not only maintains global depth consistency by correcting non-uniform depth values but also enhances the visual stereoscopic effect. Experimental results show that in subjective evaluation, the subjectively evaluated degree of satisfaction with the proposed method is approximately 7% greater than both existing commercial conversion software and state-of-the-art approach.