Hole Filling with Multiple Reference Views in DIBR View Synthesis

Depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) oriented view synthesis has been widely employed in the current depth-based 3D video systems by synthesizing a virtual view from an arbitrary viewpoint. However, holes may appear in the synthesized view due to disocclusion, thus significantly degrading the quality. Consequently, efforts have been made on developing effective and efficient hole filling algorithms. Current hole filling techniques generally extrapolate/interpolate the hole regions with the neighboring information based on an assumption that the texture pattern in the holes is similar to that of the neighboring background information. However, in many scenarios especially of complex texture, the assumption may not hold. In other words, hole filling techniques can only provide an estimation for a hole which may not be good enough or may even be erroneous considering a wide variety of complex scene of images. In this paper, we first examine the view interpolation with multiple reference views, demonstrating that the problem of emerging holes in a target virtual view can be greatly alleviated by making good use of other neighboring complementary views in addition to its two (commonly used) most neighboring primary views. The effects of using multiple views for view extrapolation in reducing holes are also investigated in this paper. In view of the 3D Video and ongoing free-viewpoint TV standardization, we propose a new view synthesis framework which employs multiple views to synthesize output virtual views. Furthermore, a scheme of selective warping of complementary views is developed by efficiently locating a small number of useful pixels in the complementary views for hole reduction, to avoid a full warping of additional complementary views thus lowering greatly the warping complexity. Experimental results show that the hole size based on two primary reference views may be reduced by up to about 70% with the help of two complementary reference views in the case of view interpolation, while the hole size based on one primary reference view may be reduced by about 27% with the help of one more complementary reference view in view extrapolation. Moreover, it is shown that by using one more pair of views in view interpolation and one more view in view extrapolation, 10% hole pixels may be reduced additionally.