DEPTH ESTIMATION FOR MULTI-VIEW VIDEO CODING

Abstract

With the advance of new technologies in the entertainment industry, the FreeViewpoint television (TV), the next generation of 3D medium, is going to give users a completely new experience of watching TV as they can freely change their viewpoints. Future TV is going to not only show but also let users “live” inside the 3D scene. A simple approach for free viewpoint TV is to use current multi-view video technology, which uses a system of multiple cameras to capture the scene. The views at positions where there is a lack of camera viewpoints must be synthesized with the support of depth information. This thesis is to study Depth Estimation Reference Software (DERS) of Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) which is a reference software for estimating depth from color videos captured by multi-view cameras. It also provides a method, which uses stored background information to improve the depth quality taken from the reference software. The experimental results exhibit the quality improvement of the depth maps estimated from the proposed method in comparison with those from the traditional method in some cases.