A simple and efficient way to compute depth maps for multi-view videos

This paper deals with depth maps extraction from multi-view video. Contrary to standard stereo matching-based approaches, depth maps are computed here using optical flow estimations between consecutive views. We compare our approach with the one proposed in the Depth Estimation Reference Software (DERS) for normalization purposes in the ISO-MPEG 3DV group. Experiments conducted on sequences provided to the normalization community show that the presented method provides high quality depth maps in terms of depth fidelity and virtual views synthesis. Moreover, being implemented on the GPU, it is far faster than the DERS.