Effects of Depth Map Quantization for Computer-Generated Multiview Images using Depth Image-Based Rendering

This paper presents the effects of depth map quantization for multiview intermediate image generation using depth image-based rendering (DIBR). DIBR synthesizes multiple virtual views of a 3D scene from a 2D image and its associated depth map. However, it needs precise depth information in order to generate reliable and accurate intermediate view images for use in multiview 3D display systems. Previous work has extensively studied the pre-processing of the depth map, but little is known about depth map quantization. In this paper, we conduct an experiment to estimate the depth map quantization that affords acceptable image quality to generate DIBR-based multiview intermediate images. The experiment uses computer-generated 3D scenes, in which the multiview images captured directly from the scene are compared to the multiview intermediate images constructed by DIBR with a number of quantized depth maps. The results showed that there was no significant effect on depth map quantization from 16-bit to 7-bit (and more specifically 96-scale) on DIBR. Hence, a depth map above 7-bit is needed to maintain sufficient image quality for a DIBR-based multiview 3D system.