Depth Map Estimation for Free-Viewpoint Television

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel, efficient depth estimation method for free-viewpoint television that improves depth map quality, consistency, and processing speed by leveraging multi-view inputs and parallelization techniques.

Contribution

The proposed algorithm advances depth estimation for FTV by enabling multi-view input processing, enhancing temporal consistency, and significantly reducing computational complexity.

Findings

Improved depth map quality over state-of-the-art methods.

Enhanced temporal and inter-view consistency of depth maps.

Reduced processing time for depth estimation.

Abstract

The paper presents a new method of depth estimation dedicated for free-viewpoint television (FTV). The estimation is performed for segments and thus their size can be used to control a trade-off between the quality of depth maps and the processing time of their estimation. The proposed algorithm can take as its input multiple arbitrarily positioned views which are simultaneously used to produce multiple inter view consistent output depth maps. The presented depth estimation method uses novel parallelization and temporal consistency enhancement methods that significantly reduce the processing time of depth estimation. An experimental assessment of the proposals has been performed, based on the analysis of virtual view quality in FTV. The results show that the proposed method provides an improvement of the depth map quality over the state of-the-art method, simultaneously reducing the complexity of depth estimation. The consistency of depth maps, which is crucial for the quality of the synthesized video and thus the quality of experience of navigating through a 3D scene, is also vastly improved.