Abstract
In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic depth estimation algorithm for Free-viewpoint TV (FTV). The proposed method is an extension of an automatic depth estimation method whereby additional manually created data is input for one or multiple frames. Automatic depth estimation methods generally have difficulty obtaining good depth results around object edges and in areas with low texture. The goal of our method is to improve the depth in these areas and reduce view synthesis artifacts in Depth Image Based Rendering. High-quality view synthesis is very important in applications such as FTV and 3DTV. We define three types of manual input data providing disparity initialization, object segmentation information, and motion information. This data is input as images, which we refer to as manual disparity map, manual edge map, and manual static map, respectively. For evaluation, we used MPEG multi-view videos to demonstrate that our algorithm can significantly improve the depth maps and, as a result, reduce view synthesis artifacts.
