Disparity Refinement near the Object Boundaries for Virtual-View Quality Enhancement

Stereo matching algorithm is usually used to obtain a disparity map from a pair of images. However, the disparity map obtained by using stereo matching contains lots of noise and error regions. In this paper, we propose a virtual-view synthesis algorithm using disparity refinement in order to improve the quality of the synthesized image. First, the error region is detected by examining the consistency of the disparity maps. Then, motion information is acquired by applying optical flow to texture component of the image in order to improve the performance. Then, the occlusion region is found using optical flow on the texture component of the image in order to improve the performance of the optical flow. The refined disparity map is finally used for the synthesis of the virtual view image. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the quality of the generated virtual-view.