Interactive view synthesis from integral photography using estimated depth information

In the field of 3-D imaging technology, Integral Photography (IP) is one of the promising approaches, and a combination of an HDTV camera and an optical fiber array has been investigated to display 3-D live video sequences. The authors have applied this system to a computer graphics method for synthesizing arbitrary views from IP images: a method of interactively displaying free-viewpoint images without physical lens array. This paper proposes a real-time method of estimating depth data corresponding to each element image on an IP image. Experimental results show that the proposed method is very useful for improving the quality of the free-viewpoint image synthesis.