26 research outputs found
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A Novel Inpainting Framework for Virtual View Synthesis
Multi-view imaging has stimulated significant research to enhance the user experience of free viewpoint video, allowing interactive navigation between views and the freedom to select a desired view to watch. This usually involves transmitting both textural and depth information captured from different viewpoints to the receiver, to enable the synthesis of an arbitrary view. In rendering these virtual views, perceptual holes can appear due to certain regions, hidden in the original view by a closer object, becoming visible in the virtual view. To provide a high quality experience these holes must be filled in a visually plausible way, in a process known as inpainting. This is challenging because the missing information is generally unknown and the hole-regions can be large. Recently depth-based inpainting techniques have been proposed to address this challenge and while these generally perform better than non-depth assisted methods, they are not very robust and can produce perceptual artefacts.
This thesis presents a new inpainting framework that innovatively exploits depth and textural self-similarity characteristics to construct subjectively enhanced virtual viewpoints. The framework makes three significant contributions to the field: i) the exploitation of view information to jointly inpaint textural and depth hole regions; ii) the introduction of the novel concept of self-similarity characterisation which is combined with relevant depth information; and iii) an advanced self-similarity characterising scheme that automatically determines key spatial transform parameters for effective and flexible inpainting.
The presented inpainting framework has been critically analysed and shown to provide superior performance both perceptually and numerically compared to existing techniques, especially in terms of lower visual artefacts. It provides a flexible robust framework to develop new inpainting strategies for the next generation of interactive multi-view technologies
Loss-resilient Coding of Texture and Depth for Free-viewpoint Video Conferencing
Free-viewpoint video conferencing allows a participant to observe the remote
3D scene from any freely chosen viewpoint. An intermediate virtual viewpoint
image is commonly synthesized using two pairs of transmitted texture and depth
maps from two neighboring captured viewpoints via depth-image-based rendering
(DIBR). To maintain high quality of synthesized images, it is imperative to
contain the adverse effects of network packet losses that may arise during
texture and depth video transmission. Towards this end, we develop an
integrated approach that exploits the representation redundancy inherent in the
multiple streamed videos a voxel in the 3D scene visible to two captured views
is sampled and coded twice in the two views. In particular, at the receiver we
first develop an error concealment strategy that adaptively blends
corresponding pixels in the two captured views during DIBR, so that pixels from
the more reliable transmitted view are weighted more heavily. We then couple it
with a sender-side optimization of reference picture selection (RPS) during
real-time video coding, so that blocks containing samples of voxels that are
visible in both views are more error-resiliently coded in one view only, given
adaptive blending will erase errors in the other view. Further, synthesized
view distortion sensitivities to texture versus depth errors are analyzed, so
that relative importance of texture and depth code blocks can be computed for
system-wide RPS optimization. Experimental results show that the proposed
scheme can outperform the use of a traditional feedback channel by up to 0.82
dB on average at 8% packet loss rate, and by as much as 3 dB for particular
frames
INTERMEDIATE VIEW RECONSTRUCTION FOR MULTISCOPIC 3D DISPLAY
This thesis focuses on Intermediate View Reconstruction (IVR) which generates additional images from the available stereo images. The main application of IVR is to generate the content of multiscopic 3D displays, and it can be applied to generate different viewpoints to Free-viewpoint TV (FTV). Although IVR is considered a good approach to generate additional images, there are some problems with the reconstruction process, such as detecting and handling the occlusion areas, preserving the discontinuity at edges, and reducing image artifices through formation of the texture of the intermediate image. The occlusion area is defined as the visibility of such an area in one image and its disappearance in the other one. Solving IVR problems is considered a significant challenge for researchers.
In this thesis, several novel algorithms have been specifically designed to solve IVR challenges by employing them in a highly robust intermediate view reconstruction
algorithm. Computer simulation and experimental results confirm the importance of occluded areas in IVR. Therefore, we propose a novel occlusion detection algorithm and another novel algorithm to Inpaint those areas. Then, these proposed algorithms are employed in a novel occlusion-aware intermediate view reconstruction that finds an intermediate image with a given disparity between two input images. This novelty is addressed by adding occlusion awareness to the reconstruction algorithm and proposing three quality improvement techniques to reduce image artifices: filling the re-sampling holes, removing ghost contours, and handling the disocclusion area.
We compared the proposed algorithms to the previously well-known algorithms on each field qualitatively and quantitatively. The obtained results show that our algorithms are superior to the previous well-known algorithms. The performance of the proposed reconstruction algorithm is tested under 13 real images and 13 synthetic images. Moreover, analysis of a human-trial experiment conducted with 21 participants confirmed that the reconstructed images from our proposed algorithm have very high quality compared with the reconstructed images from the other existing algorithms
Navigation domain representation for interactive multiview imaging
Enabling users to interactively navigate through different viewpoints of a
static scene is a new interesting functionality in 3D streaming systems. While
it opens exciting perspectives towards rich multimedia applications, it
requires the design of novel representations and coding techniques in order to
solve the new challenges imposed by interactive navigation. Interactivity
clearly brings new design constraints: the encoder is unaware of the exact
decoding process, while the decoder has to reconstruct information from
incomplete subsets of data since the server can generally not transmit images
for all possible viewpoints due to resource constrains. In this paper, we
propose a novel multiview data representation that permits to satisfy bandwidth
and storage constraints in an interactive multiview streaming system. In
particular, we partition the multiview navigation domain into segments, each of
which is described by a reference image and some auxiliary information. The
auxiliary information enables the client to recreate any viewpoint in the
navigation segment via view synthesis. The decoder is then able to navigate
freely in the segment without further data request to the server; it requests
additional data only when it moves to a different segment. We discuss the
benefits of this novel representation in interactive navigation systems and
further propose a method to optimize the partitioning of the navigation domain
into independent segments, under bandwidth and storage constraints.
Experimental results confirm the potential of the proposed representation;
namely, our system leads to similar compression performance as classical
inter-view coding, while it provides the high level of flexibility that is
required for interactive streaming. Hence, our new framework represents a
promising solution for 3D data representation in novel interactive multimedia
services
Optimized Data Representation for Interactive Multiview Navigation
In contrary to traditional media streaming services where a unique media
content is delivered to different users, interactive multiview navigation
applications enable users to choose their own viewpoints and freely navigate in
a 3-D scene. The interactivity brings new challenges in addition to the
classical rate-distortion trade-off, which considers only the compression
performance and viewing quality. On the one hand, interactivity necessitates
sufficient viewpoints for richer navigation; on the other hand, it requires to
provide low bandwidth and delay costs for smooth navigation during view
transitions. In this paper, we formally describe the novel trade-offs posed by
the navigation interactivity and classical rate-distortion criterion. Based on
an original formulation, we look for the optimal design of the data
representation by introducing novel rate and distortion models and practical
solving algorithms. Experiments show that the proposed data representation
method outperforms the baseline solution by providing lower resource
consumptions and higher visual quality in all navigation configurations, which
certainly confirms the potential of the proposed data representation in
practical interactive navigation systems
Scalable Remote Rendering using Synthesized Image Quality Assessment
Depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) is widely used to support 3D interactive graphics on low-end mobile devices. Although it reduces the rendering cost on a mobile device, it essentially turns such a cost into depth image transmission cost or bandwidth consumption, inducing performance bottleneck to a remote rendering system. To address this problem, we design a scalable remote rendering framework based on synthesized image quality assessment. Specially, we design an efficient synthesized image quality metric based on Just Noticeable Distortion (JND), properly measuring human perceived geometric distortions in synthesized images. Based on this, we predict quality-aware reference viewpoints, with viewpoint intervals optimized by the JND-based metric. An adaptive transmission scheme is also developed to control depth image transmission based on perceived quality and network bandwidth availability. Experiment results show that our approach effectively reduces transmission frequency and network bandwidth consumption with perceived quality on mobile devices maintained. A prototype system is implemented to demonstrate the scalability of our proposed framework to multiple clients