In 3D video systems, view synthesis is performed at the receiver end using decoded texture and depth videos. Due to errors and noise, boundary pixels at coded depth data exhibit inaccuracy, which affects the rendering quality. In this paper, we propose a boundary refinement filter for coded depth data. Initially, we estimate the boundary region based on gradient magnitudes, using its standard deviation as a threshold. Consecutively, we replace the depth value at the boundary region with a weighted average by means of the proposed filter. Three weights are calculated in this process: depth similarity, distance, and boundary direction. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed filter increases the PSNR of synthesized images. The improvements are confirmed subjectively as well. Hence, the quality of synthesized images is enhanced, aided by the proposed depth map filter.
['Yunseok Song', 'Yo-Sung Ho']
Depth Map Boundary Filter for Enhanced View Synthesis in 3D Video