Virtual View Generation by a New Hole Filling Algorithm

In this paper, performance improved hole-filling algorithm which includes the boundary noise removing pre-process that can be used for an arbitrary virtual view synthesis has been proposed. Boundary noise occurs due to the boundary mismatch between depth and texture images during the 3D warping process and it usually causes unusual defects in a generated virtual view. Common-hole is impossible to recover by using only a given original view as a reference and most of the conventional algorithms generate unnatural views that include constrained parts of the texture. To remove the boundary noise, we first find occlusion regions and expand these regions to the common-hole region in the synthesized view. Then, we fill the common-hole using the spiral weighted average algorithm and the gradient searching algorithm. The spiral weighted average algorithm keeps the boundary of each object well by using depth information and the gradient searching algorithm preserves the details. We tried to combine strong points of both the spiral weighted average algorithm and the gradient searching algorithm. We also tried to reduce the flickering defect that exists around the filled common-hole region by using a probability mask. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs much better than the conventional algorithms.