Superpixel matching-based depth propagation for 2D-to-3D conversion with joint bilateral filtering

In this paper, we propose superpixel matching-based depth propagation for 2D to 3D video conversion with joint bilateral filtering. First, we perform superpixel matching to estimate motion vectors of superpixels from the reference depth map instead of block matching. This is because a superpixel is a group of pixels which have similar characteristics and thus superpixel matching performs better than block matching in estimating motion vectors. Then, we conduct depth compensation based on the motion vectors to obtain the current depth map. However, the size of each superpixel is not exactly the same, which causes matching errors in the compensated depth map. Thus, we perform joint bilateral filtering to refine the depth map. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm successfully performs depth propagation and produce high-quality depth maps for 2D-to-3D conversion.