Visual Media Coding and Transmission

6.3 Inter-view Prediction using Reconstructed Disparity Information

6.3.1 Problem Definition and Objectives

In future multi-view video coding standards, the use of disparity/depth information will be essential, and consideration of coding such data is needed. Having such information enables the development of new applications containing interactivity, i.e. the user can freely navigate in a visual scene through the existence of virtual camera scenes.

In this research, the effect of lossy encoded disparity maps on the inter-view prediction will be investigated. If this information is available, it can be used to assist inter-view prediction. Hence, the overall bit rate is reduced, and furthermore the complexity of the multi-view encoder is reduced as well.

6.3.2 Proposed Technical Solution

The developed framework consists of four main building blocks, which are explained in the following subsections.

6.3.2.1 Estimation of the Fundamental Matrix

To reduce the correspondence search to one dimension, the fundamental matrix F is required. This step has to be carried out once for a fixed camera setup. The following steps are needed to estimate F [22]:

• Feature detection using Harris corner detector.
• Feature matching using Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC).
• Estimating F using the 7-pt algorithm and RANSAC.

Figure 6.4 Parameterization of disparity

6.3.2.2 Estimation of the Dense Disparity ...