Depth Map Upscaling for Three-Dimensional Television The Edge-Weighted Optimization Concept

With the recent comeback of three-dimensional (3D) movies to the cinemas, there have been increasing efforts to spread the commercial success of 3D to new markets. The possibility of a 3D experience at home, such as three-dimensional television (3DTV), has generated a great deal of interest within the research and standardization community. A central issue for 3DTV is the creation and representation of 3D content. Scene depth information plays a crucial role in all parts of the distribution chain from content capture via transmission to the actual 3D display. This depth information is transmitted in the form of depth maps and is accompanied by corresponding video frames, i.e. for Depth Image Based Rendering (DIBR) view synthesis. Nonetheless, scenarios do exist for which the original spatial resolutions of depth maps and video frames do not match, e.g. sensor driven depth capture or asymmetric 3D video coding. This resolution discrepancy is a problem, since DIBR requires accordance between the video frame and depth map. A considerable amount of research has been conducted into ways to match low-resolution depth maps to high resolution video frames. Many proposed solutions utilize corresponding texture information in the upscaling process, however they mostly fail to review this information for validity. In the strive for better 3DTV quality, this thesis presents the Edge-Weighted Optimization Concept (EWOC), a novel texture-guided depth upscaling application that addresses the lack of information validation. EWOC uses edge information from video frames as guidance in the depth upscaling process and, additionally, confirms this information based on the original low resolution depth. Over the course of four publications, EWOC is applied in 3D content creation and distribution. Various guidance sources, such as different color spaces or texture pre-processing, are investigated. An alternative depth compression scheme, based on depth map upscaling, is proposed and extensions for increased visual quality and computational performance are presented in this thesis. EWOC was evaluated and compared with competing approaches, with the main focus was consistently on the visual quality of rendered 3D views. The results show an increase in both objective and subjective visual quality to state-of-the-art depth map upscaling methods. This quality gain motivates the choice of EWOC in applications affected by low resolution depth. In the end, EWOC can improve 3D content generation and distribution, enhancing the 3D experience to boost the commercial success of 3DTV.