Depth Map Estimation for Free-Viewpoint Television

Abstract: The paper presents a new method of depth estimation dedicated for free-viewpoint television (FTV). The estimation is performed for segments and thus their size can be used to control a trade-off between the quality of depth maps and the processing time of their estimation. The proposed algorithm can take as its input multiple arbitrarily positioned views which are simultaneously used to produce multiple inter view consistent output depth maps. The presented depth estimation method uses novel parallelization and temporal consistency enhancement methods that significantly reduce the processing time of depth estimation. An experimental assessment of the proposals has been performed, based on the analysis of virtual view quality in FTV. The results show that the proposed method provides an improvement of the depth map quality over the state of-the-art method, simultaneously reducing the complexity of depth estimation. The consistency of depth maps, which is crucial for the quality of the synthesized video and thus the quality of experience of navigating through a 3D scene, is also vastly improved.