Line-preserving hole-filling for 2D-to-3D conversion

Many 2D-to-3D conversion techniques rely on image-based rendering methods in order to synthesize 3D views from monoscopic images. This leads to holes in the generated views due to previously occluded objects becoming visible for which no texture information is available. Approaches attempting to alleviate the effects of these artifacts are referred to as hole-filling. This paper proposes a method which determines a non-uniform deformation of the stereoscopic view such that no holes are visible. Additionally, an energy term is devised, which prevents straight lines in the input image from being bent due to the non-uniform image warp. This is achieved by constructing a triangle mesh, which approximates the depth map of the input image and by integrating a set of detected lines into it. The line information is incorporated into the underlying optimization problem in order to prevent bending of the lines. The evaluation of the proposed algorithm on a comprehensive dataset with a variety of scenes shows that holes are efficiently filled without obvious background distortions.