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A nonlinear disparity remapping scheme is presented to enhance the visual comfort of stereoscopic videos. The stereoscopic video is analyzed for predicting a degree of fatigue with the viewpoint of three factors: 1) spatial frequency; 2) disparity magnitude; and 3) disparity motion. The degree of fatigue is then estimated in a local manner. It can be visualized as an index map so-called a “visual fatigue map,” and an overall fatigue score is obtained by pooling the visual fatigue map. Based on this information, a nonlinear remapping operator is generated in two phases: 1) disparity range adaptation and 2) operator nonlinearization. First, a disparity range is automatically adjusted according to the determined overall fatigue score. Second, rather than linearly adjusting the disparity range of an original video to the determined disparity range, a nonlinear remapping operator is constructed in a manner that the disparity range of inducible problematic region is compressed, while that of comfortable region is stretched. The proposed scheme is verified via subjective evaluations where visual fatigue and depth sensation are compared among original videos, linearly remapped videos, and nonlinearly remapped videos. Experimental results show that the nonlinearly remapped videos provide more comfort than the linearly remapped videos without losing depth sensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a depth superresolution (SR) method that uses both of a low-resolution (LR) depth image and a high-resolution (HR) intensity image. We formulate depth SR as a graph-based transduction problem. In particular, the HR intensity image is represented as an undirected graph, in which pixels are characterized as vertices, and their relations are encoded as an affinity function. When the vertices initially labeled with certain depth hypotheses (from the LR depth image) are regarded as input queries, all the vertices are scored with respect to the relevances to these queries by a classifying function. Each vertex is then labeled with the depth hypothesis that receives the highest relevance score. We design the classifying function by considering the local and global structures of the HR intensity image. This approach enables us to address a depth bleeding problem that typically appears in current depth SR methods. Furthermore, input queries are assigned in a probabilistic manner, making depth SR robust to noisy depth measurements. We also analyze existing depth SR methods in the context of transduction, and discuss their theoretic relations. Intensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A robust similarity measure called the Mahalanobis distance cross-correlation (MDCC) is proposed for illumination-invariant stereo matching, which uses a local color distribution within support windows. It is shown that the Mahalanobis distance between the color itself and the average color is preserved under affine transformation. The MDCC converts pixels within each support window into the Mahalanobis distance transform (MDT) space. The similarity between MDT pairs is then computed using the cross-correlation with an asymmetric weight function based on the Mahalanobis distance. The MDCC considers correlation on cross-color channels, thus providing robustness to affine illumination variation. Experimental results show that the MDCC outperforms state-of-the-art similarity measures in terms of stereo matching for image pairs taken under different illumination conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Quality perception of 3-D images is one of the most important parameters for accelerating advances in 3-D imaging fields. Despite active research in recent years for understanding the quality perception of 3-D images, binocular quality perception of asymmetric distortions in stereoscopic images is not thoroughly comprehended. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the perceptual quality of stereoscopic images and visual information, and introduce a model for binocular quality perception. Based on this binocular quality perception model, a no-reference quality metric for stereoscopic images is proposed. The proposed metric is a top-down method modeling the binocular quality perception of the human visual system in the context of blurriness and blockiness. Perceptual blurriness and blockiness scores of left and right images were computed using local blurriness, blockiness, and visual saliency information and then combined into an overall quality index using the binocular quality perception model. Experiments for image and video databases show that the proposed metric provides consistent correlations with subjective quality scores. The results also show that the proposed metric provides higher performance than existing full-reference methods even though the proposed method is a no-reference approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Color-plus-depth video format has been increasingly popular in 3-D video applications, such as auto-stereoscopic 3-D TV and freeview TV. The performance of these applications is heavily dependent on the quality of depth maps since intermediate views are synthesized using the corresponding depth maps. This paper presents a novel framework for obtaining high-quality multiview color-plus-depth video using a hybrid sensor, which consists of multiple color cameras and depth sensors. Given multiple high-resolution color images and low quality depth maps obtained from the color cameras and depth sensors, we improve the quality of the depth map corresponding to each color view by increasing its spatial resolution and enforcing interview coherence. Specifically, a new up-sampling method considering the interview coherence is proposed to enhance multiview depth maps. This approach can improve the performance of the existing up-sampling algorithms, such as joint bilateral up-sampling and weighted mode filtering, which have been developed to enhance a single-view depth map only. In addition, an adaptive approach of fusing multiple input low-resolution depth maps is proposed based on the reliability that considers camera geometry and depth validity. The proposed framework can be extended into the temporal domain for temporally consistent depth maps. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides better multiview depth quality than the conventional single-view-based methods. We also show that it provides comparable results, yet much more efficiently, to other fusion approaches that employ both depth sensors and stereo matching algorithm together. Moreover, it is shown that the proposed method significantly reduces bit rates required to compress the multiview color-plus-depth video. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the origin of random walk with restart (RWR) and its generalization are described. It is well known that the random walk (RW) and the anisotropic diffusion models share the same energy functional, i.e., the former provides a steady-state solution and the latter gives a flow solution. In contrast, the theoretical background of the RWR scheme is different from that of the diffusion-reaction equation, although the restarting term of the RWR plays a role similar to the reaction term of the diffusion-reaction equation. The behaviors of the two approaches with respect to outliers reveal that they possess different attributes in terms of data propagation. This observation leads to the derivation of a new energy functional, where both volumetric heat capacity and thermal conductivity are considered together, and provides a common framework that unifies both the RW and the RWR approaches, in addition to other regularization methods. The proposed framework allows the RWR to be generalized (GRWR) in semilocal and nonlocal forms. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of GRWR over existing regularization approaches in terms of depth map up-sampling and interactive image segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]