STEREO MATCHING FOR ENHANCED TELEPRESENCE IN 3-DIMENSIONAL VIDEOCOMMUNICATIONS

A robust approach for joined motion and disparity estimation in stereo sequences to synthesize arbitrary intermediate views is presented, Th e improved concept far stereo image analysis is based on a modified bl ock matching algorithm, in which a cost function consisting of area-ba sed correlation together with an appropriately weighted temporal smoot hness term is applied. A confidence measure to evaluate the reliabilit y of estimated correspondences is introduced. In occluded image areas and image points with unreliable motion or disparity assignments, cons iderable improvements are obtained applying an edge-assisted vector in terpolation strategy, Two different image synthesis concepts are prese nted as well, The reported approach is verified by processing a set of sequences taken with stereo cameras having large interaxial distances , Computer simulations show that telepresence illusion with continuous motion parallax and good image quality can be obtained using the meth ods presented.