Fast ray-space interpolation with depth discontinuity preserving for free viewpoint video system

Abstract

Ray-space representation is the main technology to realize free viewpoint video system with complicated scenes. Ray-space interpolation is one of key problems to be solved. A new fast ray-space interpolation method that can preserve depth discontinuity is proposed in this paper. Discontinuity features of ray-space data are first extracted by using adaptive threshold, then, a cross check operation is carried out between neighboring epipolar lines to refine the extracted feature points. After that, ray directions of feature points are determined, and ray-space interpolation is implemented in the regions segmented by feature points. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves much higher PSNR than the pixel matching based interpolation method and the block matching based interpolation method, and the quality of rendered intermediate viewpoint images is also improved greatly. In addition, the proposed interpolation method requires low computational cost and is suitable for hardware implementation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.