Objective quality metric for 3D virtual views

In free-viewpoint television (FTV) framework, due to hard-ware and bandwidth constraints, only a limited number of viewpoints are generally captured, coded and transmitted; therefore, a large number of views needs to be synthesized at the receiver to grant a really immersive 3D experience. It is thus evident that the estimation of the quality of the synthesized views is of paramount importance. Moreover, quality assessment of the synthesized view is very challeng-ing since the corresponding original views are generally not available either on the encoder (not captured) or the decoder side (not transmitted). To tackle the mentioned issues, this paper presents an algorithm to estimate the quality of the synthesized images in the absence of the corresponding ref-erence images. The algorithm is based upon the cyclopean eye theory. The statistical characteristics of an estimated cy-clopean image are compared with the synthesized image to measure its quality. The prediction accuracy and reliability of the proposed technique are tested on standard video dataset compressed with HEVC showing excellent correlation results with respect to state-of-the-art full reference image and video quality metrics. Index Terms — Quality assessment, depth image based rendering, view synthesis, FTV, HEVC 1

Recent Advances in Image Restoration with Applications to Real World Problems

In the past few decades, imaging hardware has improved tremendously in terms of resolution, making widespread usage of images in many diverse applications on Earth and planetary missions. However, practical issues associated with image acquisition are still affecting image quality. Some of these issues such as blurring, measurement noise, mosaicing artifacts, low spatial or spectral resolution, etc. can seriously affect the accuracy of the aforementioned applications. This book intends to provide the reader with a glimpse of the latest developments and recent advances in image restoration, which includes image super-resolution, image fusion to enhance spatial, spectral resolution, and temporal resolutions, and the generation of synthetic images using deep learning techniques. Some practical applications are also included

Driving into the Future: Multiview Visual Forecasting and Planning with World Model for Autonomous Driving

In autonomous driving, predicting future events in advance and evaluating the foreseeable risks empowers autonomous vehicles to better plan their actions, enhancing safety and efficiency on the road. To this end, we propose Drive-WM, the first driving world model compatible with existing end-to-end planning models. Through a joint spatial-temporal modeling facilitated by view factorization, our model generates high-fidelity multiview videos in driving scenes. Building on its powerful generation ability, we showcase the potential of applying the world model for safe driving planning for the first time. Particularly, our Drive-WM enables driving into multiple futures based on distinct driving maneuvers, and determines the optimal trajectory according to the image-based rewards. Evaluation on real-world driving datasets verifies that our method could generate high-quality, consistent, and controllable multiview videos, opening up possibilities for real-world simulations and safe planning.Comment: Project page: https://drive-wm.github.io. Code: https://github.com/BraveGroup/Drive-W