Watershed based depth map misalignment correction and foreground biased dilation for DIBR view synthesis

The quality of the synthesized views by Depth Image Based Rendering (DIBR) highly depends on the accuracy of the depth map, especially the alignment of object boundaries of texture image. In practice, the misalignment of sharp depth map edges is the major cause of the annoying artifacts at the disoccluded regions of the synthesized views. In this paper, a new depth map preprocessing method using Watershed misalignment correction and dilation filter is proposed to align the foreground depth edges to cover the whole transitional color edge regions. This approach can handle the sharp depth map edges lying inside or outside the object boundaries in 2D sense. The quality of the disoccluded regions of the synthesized views can be significantly improved. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves superior performance for view synthesis by DIBR especially for generating large baseline virtual views. © 2013 IEEE.