Iterative mask generation method for handling occlusion in optical flow assisted view interpolation

Having a key role in 3D and free viewpoint TV applications, view interpolation techniques have attracted many researchers in recent years. In this paper we present a patch-based reconstruction scheme for view interpolation using optical flow disparity estimation. In the first step of the algorithm, reconstructed versions of the left and right views are obtained using the proposed patch-based scheme. Then mismatch masks are generated to find the best patches for final reconstruction. Finally the intermediate view is obtained by fusing the selected patches and the remaining holes are filled with a simple hole-filling algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with recent methods in terms of objective and subjective quality. The results show that the proposed method achieves an improvement of 3.3 dB on average.