DEPTH IMAGE BASED VIEW SYNTHESIS WITH MULTIPLE REFERENCE VIEWS FOR VIRTUAL REALITY

Abstract

This paper presents a method for view synthesis from multiple views and their depth maps for free navigation in Virtual Reality with six degrees of freedom (6DoF) and 360 video (3DoF+), including synthesizing views corresponding to stepping in or out of the scene. Such scenarios should support large baseline view synthesis, typically going beyond the view synthesis involved in light field displays [1]. Our method allows to input an unlimited number of reference views, instead of the usual left and right reference views. Increasing the number of reference views overcomes problems such as occlusions, tangential surfaces to the cameras axis and artifacts in low quality depth maps. We outperform MPEG’s reference software, VSRS [2], with a gain of up to 2.5 dB in PSNR when using four reference views.