View synthesis with sparse light field for 6DoF immersive video

Abstract

Virtual view synthesis, which generates novel views similar to the characteristics of actually acquired images, is an essential technical component for delivering an immersive video with realistic binocular disparity and smooth motion parallax. This is typically achieved in sequence by warping the given images to the designated viewing position, blending warped images, and filling the remaining holes. When considering 6DoF use cases with huge motion, the warping method in patch unit is more preferable than other conventional methods running in pixel unit. Regarding the prior case, the quality of synthesized image is highly relevant to the means of blending. Based on such aspect, we proposed a novel blending architecture that exploits the similarity of the directions of rays and the distribution of depth values. By further employing the proposed method, results showed that more enhanced view was synthesized compared with the well-designed synthesizers used within moving picture expert group (MPEG-I). Moreover, we explained the GPU-based implementation synthesizing and rendering views in the level of real time by considering the applicability for immersive video service.

Keywords

• depth image-based rendering
• image blending
• immersive video
• view synthesis
• warping