Improving quality of unwarped omni-images with irregularly-distributed unfilled pixels by a new edge-preserving interpolation technique

A new method called ‘‘edge-preserving 8-directional two-layered weighting interpolation’’ is proposed for interpolating unfilled pixels in a perspective-view or panoramic image resulting from unwarping an omni-image taken by a non-single-view-point hypercatadioptric camera. This method can solve the problem of edge preserving in interpolating the input image which has many irregularly-distributed unfilled pixels. Three concepts of weighting have been considered in the proposed edge-preserving interpolation process: (1) inverse-distance weighting; (2) pixel-count weighting; and (3) region-wise weighting. Good experimental results showing the effectiveness of edge preserving and its superiority to other methods are also included. 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.