The effect of H.264-AVC coding artifacts on intermediate view synthesis for multicamera systems

In rapidly deployable video surveillance networks, camera positions may be heavily constrained and coverage limited and often sparse. To enhance visualization, automatic depth estimation algorithms can be utilized to enable the synthesis of arbitrary views of the scene, offering a pseudo ´look-around´ capability. In a wireless local area network, bandwidth limitations and channel transmission errors may introduce artifacts into the video data to be analysed. This paper describes a disparity analysis and view synthesis algorithm and using the H.264/AVC video coding standard, investigates the effect of compression artifacts on the objective and subjective quality of the synthesised views.