A qualitative comparison of MPEG view synthesis and light field rendering

Free Viewpoint Television (FTV) is a new modality in next generation television, which provides the viewer free navigation through the scene, using image-based view synthesis from a couple of camera view inputs. The recently developed MPEG reference software technology is, however, restricted to narrow baselines and linear camera arrangements. Its reference software currently implements stereo matching and interpolation techniques, designed mainly to support three camera inputs (middle-left and middleright stereo). Especially in view of future use case scenarios in multi-scopic 3D displays, where hundreds of output views are generated from a limited number (tens) of wide baseline input views, it becomes mandatory to fully exploit all input camera information to its maximal potential. We therefore revisit existing view interpolation techniques to support dozens of camera inputs for better view synthesis performance. In particular, we show that Light Fields yield average PSNR gains of approximately 5 dB over MPEG´s existing depth-based multiview video technology, even in the presence of large baselines.