High-quality view interpolation based on depth maps and its hardware implementation

Three dimensional (3D) vision applications have drawn more attention nowadays and many products are entering the mass market. View interpolation is a crucial step to generate intermediate viewpoints from reference images. However, it is still challenging to achieve good performance in both processing speed and image quality for various 3D applications. In this paper, a hardware-compatible view interpolation algorithm is proposed, which can produce high-quality intermediate images by disparity warping and color blending. Moreover, a fully pipelined hardware architecture is designed based on the algorithm. A prototype of the proposed architecture has been implemented on an Altera Stratix-IV FPGA board, achieving 65 frames per second (fps) with a full HD (1920 × 1080) resolution. It is evaluated on the Middlebury benchmark quantitatively, and visual results of real-world images are also provided.