Quality Evaluation of DIBR-Synthesized Images Based on Holes and Expanded Regions

Abstract

With the Depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) technique, virtual views can be drawn at any position between two reference viewpoints. However, DIBR algorithm may introduce various distortions in the synthesized images, such as holes, artifact, and stretching. This paper proposes a quality evaluation method for DIBR-synthesized images by analyzing the holes and expanded regions. First, the holes regions are obtained with the watershed algorithm and used to evaluate the quality of the DIBR-synthesized images. Then, the synthesized image is compared with the reference image in the sub-channel, and the number of different pixel values is used to assess the global quality of synthesized images. Finally, the two measures are pooled to calculate the overall quality score of the DIBR synthesized image. Experimental results show that our scheme can better predict the image quality and performs better in terms of implementation time compared with other schemes. INDEX TERMS DIBR, synthesized image, quality evaluation, watershed algorithm, expanded regions.