Abstract
Three dimensional television (3D-TV) is expected to be the next step in the advancement of television. Many famous universities and research organizations all over the world have concentrated on how to design a compatible and flexible broadcasting system of 3D-TV. Besides, another popular topic is the stereo image rendering. In the future, the technology of 3D-TV will be presented by advertisement boards, movie theaters, home TVs, and LCD monitors. Their contents become more photographic than before. But, it is impractical to transmit images of all view angles due to the limitation of bandwidth. Depth image based rendering (DIBR) is a commonly used technique to generate virtual views of a scene from a known view and an associated depth map. However, a major problem with DIBR is that the shifted pixels now occupy new positions and leave areas that they originally occupied ”empty”. These disoccluded regions have to be filled properly, otherwise they can degrade image quality. There are many proposals to deal with the problem. We analyze different methods for filling the disoccluded regions, including (a) constant color filling, (b) horizontal interpolation, (c) horizontal extrapolation using depth information, (d) variational inpainting using depth information and (e) smoothing of depth maps. It is analyzed about the feasibility of using these methods for hardware implementation. Finally, we compare the results of software simulation for visible perspective of human and use Verilog HDL to develop the hardware architecture of the suitable algorithm and implement the prototype on Xilinx multimedia board.