Multiview video plus depth transmission via virtual-view-assisted complementary down/upsampling

Multiview video plus depth is a popular 3D video format which can provide viewers a vivid 3D feeling. However, its requirements in terms of computational complexity and transmission bandwidth are more than that of conventional 2D video. To mitigate these limitations, some works have proposed to reduce the amount of transmitted data by adopting different resolutions for different views, and consequently, the transmitted video is called mixed resolution video. In order to further reduce the transmitted data and maintain good quality at the decoder side; in this paper, we propose a down/upsampling algorithm for 3D multiview video which systematically takes into account the video encoder and decoder. At the encoder side, the rows of the two adjacent views are downsampled following an interlacing and complementary fashion, whereas, at the decoder side, the discarded pixels are recovered by fusing the virtual view pixels with the directional interpolated pixels from the complementary downsampled views. Moreover, the patterns of the texture surrounding the discarded pixels are used to aid the data fusion, so as to enhance edges recovery. Meanwhile, with the assistance of virtual views, at the decoder side, the proposed approach can effectively recover the discarded high-frequency details. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework.