Region-Aware 3-D Warping for DIBR

In 3-D video (3DV) applications, depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) has been widely employed to synthesize virtual views. However, this approach is performed in a frame-based way, meaning each whole frame is dealt with and the characteristics of different regions in the frame are ignored. As a result, redundant pixels in some regions are abused during the subsequent warping and blending stage. This paper proposes a region-aware 3-D warping approach for DIBR in which warped frames are reasonably divided beforehand so that only the indispensable regions are used. With the proposed scheme, it is possible to avoid noneffective and repeated pixels during the warping stage. In addition, the blending process is also saved. The experimental results show that compared to the state-of-the-art VSRS3.5 and VSRS-1D-fast algorithms, our approach can achieve significant computation savings without sacrificing synthesis quality.