• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.5 no.11
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• pp.2175-2190
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• 2011

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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.3558-3577
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• 2017

In 2D-to-3D video conversion process, the virtual left and right view can be generated from 2D video and its corresponding depth map by depth image based rendering (DIBR). The depth map plays an important role in conversion system, so the copyright protection for depth map is necessary. However, the provided virtual views may be distributed illegally and the depth map does not directly expose to viewers. In previous works, the copyright information embedded into the depth map cannot be extracted from virtual views after the DIBR process. In this paper, a new copyright protection scheme for the depth map is proposed, in which the copyright information can be detected from the virtual views even without the depth map. The experimental results have shown that the proposed method has a good robustness against JPEG attacks, filtering and noise.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.1121-1139
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• 2015

In texture-plus-depth format, depth map compression is an important task. Different from normal texture images, depth maps have less texture information, while contain many homogeneous regions separated by sharp edges. This feature will be employed to form an efficient depth map coding scheme in this paper. Firstly, the histogram of the depth map will be analyzed to find an appropriate threshold that segments the depth map into the foreground and background regions, allowing the edge between these two kinds of regions to be obtained. Secondly, the two regions will be encoded through rate distortion optimization with a shape adaptive wavelet transform, while the edges are lossless encoded with JBIG2. Finally, a depth-updating algorithm based on the threshold and the depth range is applied to enhance the quality of the decoded depth maps. Experimental results demonstrate the effective performance on both the depth map quality and the synthesized view quality.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.3-10
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• 2018

Depth map has been utilized in a varity of fields. Recently research on generating depth map by artificial neural network (ANN) has gained much interest. This paper validates the feasibility of implementing the ready-made depth map generation by convolutional neural network (CNN). First, for a given image, a depth map is generated by the weighted average of a saliency map as well as a motion history image. Then CNN network is trained by test images and depth maps. The objective and subjective experiments are performed on the CNN and showed that the CNN can replace the ready-made depth generation method.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.185-195
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• 2004

This paper presents a multi-depth map fusion method for the 3D scene reconstruction. It fuses depth maps obtained from the stereo matching technique and the depth camera. Traditional stereo matching techniques that estimate disparities between two images often produce inaccurate depth map because of occlusion and homogeneous area. Depth map obtained from the depth camera is globally accurate but noisy and provide a limited depth range. In order to get better depth estimates than these two conventional techniques, we propose a depth map fusion method that fuses the multi-depth maps from stereo matching and the depth camera. We first obtain two depth maps generated from the stereo matching of 3-view images. Moreover, a depth map is obtained from the depth camera for the center-view image. After preprocessing each depth map, we select a depth value for each pixel among them. Simulation results showed a few improvements in some background legions by proposed fusion technique.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.283-295
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• 2021

This paper proposes a method for generating dense depth map using information of color images and depth map generated based on lidar based on self-organizing map. The proposed depth map upsampling method consists of an initial depth prediction step for an area that has not been acquired from LiDAR and an initial depth filtering step. In the initial depth prediction step, stereo matching is performed on two color images to predict an initial depth value. In the depth map filtering step, in order to reduce the error of the predicted initial depth value, a self-organizing map technique is performed on the predicted depth pixel by using the measured depth pixel around the predicted depth pixel. In the process of self-organization map, a weight is determined according to a difference between a distance between a predicted depth pixel and an measured depth pixel and a color value corresponding to each pixel. In this paper, we compared the proposed method with the bilateral filter and k-nearest neighbor widely used as a depth map upsampling method for performance comparison. Compared to the bilateral filter and the k-nearest neighbor, the proposed method reduced by about 6.4% and 8.6% in terms of MAE, and about 10.8% and 14.3% in terms of RMSE.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.17-21
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• 2022

A variety of techniques have been proposed in the literature for depth improvement in depth from focus method. Unfortunately, these techniques over-smooth the depth maps over the regions of depth discontinuities. In this paper, we propose a robust technique for improving the depth map by employing a nonconvex smoothness function that preserves the depth edges. In addition, the proposed technique exploits the mutual structures between the depth map and a guidance map. This guidance map is designed by taking the mean of image intensities in the image sequence. The depth map is updated iteratively till the nonconvex objective function converges. Experiments performed on real complex image sequences revealed the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2020.07a
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• pp.286-287
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• 2020

Depth map is the most common way of expressing 3D space in immersive media. In this paper, we propose a post-processing method to improve the quality of depth map. In proposed method, a depth map is divided into segments, and the plane of each segment estimated using RANSAC. In order to increase the accuracy of the RANSAC process, we apply matching reliability of each pixel in depth map as a weighting factor.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.9
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• pp.3146-3158
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• 2014

Efficient depth map coding is very crucial to the multi-view plus depth (MVD) format of 3-D video representation, as the quality of the synthesized virtual views highly depends on the accuracy of the depth map. Depth map contains smooth area within an object but distinct boundary, and these boundary areas affect the visual quality of synthesized views significantly. In this paper, we characterize the depth map by an auto-covariance analysis to show the locally anisotropic features of depth map. According to the characterization analysis, we propose an efficient depth map coding scheme, in which the directional discrete cosine transforms (DDCT) is adopted to substitute the conventional 2-D DCT to preserve the boundary information and thereby increase the quality of synthesized view. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves better performance than that of conventional DCT with respect to the bitrate savings and rendering quality.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.2730-2747
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• 2016

Due to the limitation of the bandwidth resource and capture resolution of depth cameras, low resolution depth maps should be up-sampled to high resolution so that they can correspond to their texture images. In this paper, a novel depth map up-sampling algorithm is proposed by exploiting the fractal internal self-referential feature. Fractal parameters which are extracted from a depth map, describe the internal self-referential feature of the depth map, do not introduce inherent scale and just retain the relational information of the depth map, i.e., fractal transforms provide a resolution-independent description for depth maps and could up-sample depth maps to an arbitrary high resolution. Then, an enhancement method is also proposed to further improve the performance of the up-sampled depth map. The experimental results demonstrate that better quality of synthesized views is achieved both on objective and subjective performance. Most important of all, arbitrary resolution depth maps can be obtained with the aid of the proposed scheme.