A novel and efficient methodology is presented for the conversion of stereo to multi-view video in order to address the 3D content requirements for the next generation 3D-TVs and auto-stereoscopic multi-view displays. There are two main algorithmic blocks in such a conversion system / stereo matching and virtual view rendering that enable extraction of 3D information from stereo video and synthesis of inexistent virtual views, respectively. In the intermediate steps of these functional blocks, a novel edge-preserving filter is proposed that recursively constructs connected support regions for each pixel among color-wise similar neighboring pixels. The proposed recursive update structure eliminates pre-defined window dependency of the conventional approaches, providing complete content adaptibility with quite low computational complexity. Based on extensive tests, it is observed that the proposed filtering technique yields better or competitive results against some leading techniques in the literature. The proposed filter is mainly applied for stereo matching to aggregate cost functions and also handles occlusions that enable high quality disparity maps for the stereo pairs. Similar to box filter paradigm, this novel technique yields matching of arbitrary-shaped regions in constant time. Based on Middlebury benchmarking, the proposed technique is currently the best local matching technique in the literature in terms of both precision and complexity. Next, virtual view synthesis is conducted through depth image based rendering, in which reference color views of left and right pairs are warped to the desired virtual view using the estimated disparity maps. A feedback mechanism based on disparity error is introduced at this step to remove salient distortions for the sake of visual quality. Furthermore, the proposed edge-aware filter is re-utilized to assign proper texture for holes and occluded regions during view synthesis. Efficiency of the proposed scheme is validated by the real-time implementation on a special graphics card that enables parallel computing. Based on extensive experiments on stereo matching and virtual view rendering, proposed method yields fast execution, low memory requirement and high quality outputs with superior performance compared to most of the state-of-the-art techniques.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12614513/index.pdf |
Date | 01 July 2012 |
Creators | Cigla, Cevahir |
Contributors | Alatan, Aydin Abdullah |
Publisher | METU |
Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Ph.D. Thesis |
Format | text/pdf |
Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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