In this study, we investigated the quality factors in view synthesis that might lead to the visual discomfort and degradation of the overall viewing quality of the synthesized multi-view stereo or free viewpoint images. In particular, we focused on the investigation of the left and right (LR) image mismatch that might be one of the most important quality factors in the stereoscopic viewing. In order to measure how severely this factor influences the visual comfort and overall quality, we conducted a series of subjective assessment experiments on the visual comfort and viewing preference. In the subjective experiments, we compared the stereo view synthesis results of three different hole filling methods, because incorrectly filled holes could cause severe mismatches between the left-and rightview images. The subjective results revealed that the LR image mismatch could induce more visual discomfort and lower overall quality of stereoscopic images. Also, the results indicated that the visual comfort and overall quality were able to be improved by considering the inter-view consistency in multi-view stereo generation.
This paper presents a new multi-view stereo image synthesis using binocular symmetric hole filling. In autostereoscopic displays, multi-view synthesis is needed to provide multiple perspectives of the same scene, as viewed from multiple viewing positions. In the warped image at a distant virtual viewpoint, it is difficult to generate visually plausible multiview stereo images in multi-view synthesis since very large hole regions (i.e., disoccluded regions) could be induced. Also, binocular asymmetry between the synthesized left-eye and right-eye images is one of the critical factors, which leads to a visual discomfort in stereoscopic viewing. In this paper, we maintain the binocular symmetry using the already filled regions in an adjacent view. The proposed method introduces a binocular symmetric hole filling based on the global optimization for binocular symmetry in the synthesized multi-view stereo images. The experimental results showed that the proposed method outperformed those of the existing methods.
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