Abstract
This paper presents a method of virtual view synthesis using view plus depth data from multiple viewpoints. Intuitively,
virtual view generation from those data can be easily achieved by simple 3D warping. However, 3D points reconstructed
from those data are isolated, i.e. not connected with each other. Consequently, the images generated by existing methods
have many holes that are very annoying due to occlusions and the limited sampling density. To tackle this problem, we
propose two steps algorithm as follows. In the first step, view plus depth data from each viewpoint is 3D warped to the
virtual viewpoint. In this process, we determine which neighboring pixels should be connected or kept isolated. For this
determination, we use depth differences among neighboring pixels, and SLIC-based superpixel segmentation that
considers both color and depth information. The pixel pairs that have small depth differences or reside in same
superpixels are connected, and the polygons enclosed by the connected pixels are inpainted, which greatly reduces the
holes. This warping process is performed individually for each viewpoint from which view plus depth data are provided,
resulting in several images at the virtual viewpoint that are warped from different viewpoints. In the second step, we
merge those warped images to obtain the final result. Thanks to the data provided from different viewpoints, the final
result has less noises and holes compared to the result from single viewpoint information. Experimental results using
publicly available view plus depth data are reported to validate our method.
