Virtual view synthesis using stereo vision based on the sum of absolute difference

• A novel virtual view synthesis algorithm based on the sum of absolute difference (SAD) stereo matching is proposed.
• The proposed algorithm adopts the sum of absolute difference based stereo matching to produce disparity and depth images.
• Image interpolation is used to render virtual view images and reverse mapping is adopted to fill up the holes.
• Experimental results on various test images indicate the validity and accuracy of the proposed algorithm.

With the development of multimedia, the technology of image and video is growing from 2D to 3D, thus interactivity is going to become a main character of future multimedia technology. Virtual view synthesis, known as the analogue expression to the real world, is one of the key techniques in interactive 3D video systems. This paper proposes a new algorithm of virtual view synthesis, which is based on disparity estimation. Considering two rectified input reference images that are taken in the same scene simultaneously, the accurate dense disparity maps are gained as the first step. Then image interpolation is used to synthesize certain virtual view image and reverse mapping is adopted to fill up the holes which are formed in previous process. By defining a position parameter, this algorithm can produce results at an arbitrary view between the two original views. Experimental results illustrate the superiority of the proposed method.

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