Viewpoint interpolation: Direct and variational methods

We address the topic of novel view synthesis from a stereoscopic pair of images. The techniques have mainly 3 stages: the reconstruction of correspondences between the views, the estimation of the blending factor of each view for the final view, and the rendering. The state of the art has mainly focused on the correspondence topic, but little work addresses the question of which blending factors are best. The rendering methods can be classified into “direct” methods, defining the final image as a function of the original images, and “vari-ational” methods, where the synthesized image is expressed as the solution minimising an energy. In this paper, we experiment different combinations of the blending factors and the rendering method, in order to demonstrate the effect of these two factors on the final image quality.