A semi-automatic multi-view depth estimation method

In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic depth estimation algorithm whereby the user defines object depth boundaries and disparity initialization. Automatic depth estimation methods generally have difficulty to obtain good depth results around object edges and in areas with low texture. The goal of our method is to improve the depth in these areas and reduce view synthesis artifacts in Depth Image Based Rendering. Good view synthesis quality is very important in applications such as 3DTV and Free-viewpoint Television (FTV). In our proposed method, initial disparity values for smooth areas can be input through a so-called manual disparity map, and depth boundaries are defined by a manually created edge map which can be supplied for one or multiple frames. For evaluation we used MPEG multi-view videos and we demonstrate our algorithm can significantly improve the depth maps and reduce view synthesis artifacts.