Depth-aided exemplar-based hole filling for DIBR view synthesis

Quality of synthesized view by Depth-Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) highly depends on hole filling, especially for synthesized view with large disocclusion. Many hole filling methods are proposed to improve the synthesized view quality and inpainting is the most popular approach to recover the disocclusions. However, the conventional inpainting either makes the hole regions blurred via diffusion or propagates the foreground information to the disoclusion regions. Annoying artifacts are created in the synthesized virtual views. This paper proposes a depth-aided exemplar-based inpainting method for recovering large disoclusion. It consists of two processes, warped depth map filling and warped color image filling. Since depth map can be considered as a grey-scale image without texture, it is much easier to be filled. Disoccluded regions of color image are predicted based on its associated filled depth map information. Regions with texture lying around the background have higher priority to be filled than other regions and disoccluded regions are filled by propagating the background texture through the exemplar-based inpainting. Thus artifacts created by diffusion or using foreground information for prediction can be eliminated. Experimental results show texture can be recovered in large disocclusions and the proposed method has better visual quality compared to existing methods. © 2013 IEEE.