Improved 3D video synthesis combining graph cuts and chroma key technology

Abstract

Depth information is essential for 3DTV applications, as it is used for the synthesis of virtual views of a scene. In this paper, we propose a new approach for 3DTV content synthesis, by integrating an existing state-of-the-art MRF-based disparity es-timation method with additional pre- and post-processing steps. The key of the proposed method is the decomposition of the scene in foreground and background. To this end, chroma key technology is used to facilitate the detection of foreground ob-jects and to significantly improve depth estimation for these objects. Then, we can combine the decomposed color frames with any background image to generate a new representation of the scene and the foreground depth images with the correspond-ing background depth information. Experimental results have shown that the proposed approach can produce satisfactory depth maps with improved silhouettes for foreground objects and a stable background for all the frames of the sequence. View