Auxiliary data for artifacts—aware view synthesis

Abstract

Original or compressed Auxiliary Data, including possibly major depth discontinuities in the form of shape images, partial occlusion data, associated tuned and control parameters, and depth information of the original video(s), are used to facilitate the interactive display and generation of new views (view synthesis) of conventional 2D, stereo, and multi-view videos in conventional 2D, 3D (stereo) and multi-view or autostereoscopic displays with reduced artifacts. The partial or full occlusion data includes image, depth and opacity data of possibly partially occluded areas to facilitate the reduction of artifacts in the synthesized view. An efficient method is used for extracting objects at partially occluded regions as defined by the auxiliary data from the texture videos to facilitate view synthesis with reduced artifacts. Further, a method for updating the image background and the depth values uses the auxiliary data after extraction of each object to reduce the artifacts due to limited performance of online inpainting of missing data or holes during view synthesis.