Edge-aided virtual view rendering for multiview video plus depth

Depth-Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) of virtual views is a fundamental method in three dimensional 3-D video applications to produce dierent perspectives from texture and depth information, in particular the multi-viewplus-depth (MVD) format. Artifacts are still present in virtual views as a consequence of imperfect rendering using existing DIBR methods. In this paper, we propose an alternative DIBR method for MVD. In the proposed method we introduce an edge pixel and interpolate pixel values in the virtual view using the actual projected coordinates from two adjacent views, by which cracks and disocclusions are automatically lled. In particular, we propose a method to merge pixel information from two adjacent views in the virtual view before the interpolation; we apply a weighted averaging of projected pixels within the range of one pixel in the virtual view. We compared virtual view images rendered by the proposed method to the corresponding view images rendered by state-of-theart methods. Objective metrics demonstrated an advantage of the proposed method for most investigated media contents. Subjective test results showed preference to dierent methods depending on media content, and the test could not demonstrate a signicant dierence between the proposed method and state-of-the-art methods