3D Visual Communications

4.4 3D Multi-View Generation

In this section, we discuss the topic of how to derive a multi-view 3D content from a stereo image pair, as the future glass-free displays require multi-view content. So far, no automatic multi-view generation algorithm can claim to reach a satisfactory visual quality, so some human editing or tuning is necessary during the processing. A few fundamental automatic modules are required in the process:

• Depth extraction from stereo content: stereo matching is a typical approach to estimate disparity from a given stereo image pair. In [6], a large number of efforts in this field have been evaluated.
• New view synthesis: 3D warping is a key approach in depth-based view synthesis, in which the pixels in a reference image are back-projected to 3D spaces, and then reprojected onto the target viewpoint. In this approach, visual errors, such as black-contours appearing, and holes around boundaries, need to be fixed using filtering or in-painting techniques.

  In this process, the major challenges can be summarized as follows:

• Missing information due to occlusion will produce noticeable errors in the newly generated views.
• Flickering artifacts around object boundaries and disoccluded regions in the new views will cause degradation in viewing experiences.
• The viewing condition related aspects, such as display size, light condition, specific autostereoscopic display characteristics and constraints, and so on, should be taken into account in the process.
• The user ...