View synthesis quality mapping for depth-based super resolution on mixed resolution 3D video

Advances in 3D video technology expand the availability of hardware for 3D video generation and display. Some 3D capture and coding arrangements take advantage of a mixed resolution setup. In difference to typical 3D multiview video the mixed resolution scenario assumes that a subset of views is coded at reduced spatial resolution. After decoding, the low resolution views have to upsampled in order to preserve homogeneous resolution of the rendered 3D video. We improve the depth-based super resolution technique that uses a view synthesis process as an essential step. We propose to improve the view synthesis step by per-pixel selection of the projection method. The method is tested on the data coded using a mixed resolution 3D video codec implemented on top of the 3DV-ATM reference software and evaluated under the JCT-3V common test conditions. Simulation results show that our method can improve the depth-based super resolution upsampling by 0.64% of dBR on average for total coded bitrate and 0.55% of dBR on average for synthesized views. Aggregated coding gain with respect to full resolution scenario is improved by 7.71% of dBR on average for total coded bitrate and 11.1% dBR for synthesized views.