Post-processing of 3D video extension of H.264/AVC for a quality enhancement of synthesized view sequences

Since July of 2012, the 3D video extension of H.264/AVC has been under development to support the multi-view video plus depth format. In 3D video applications such as multi-view and free-view point applications, synthesized views are generated using coded texture video and coded depth video. Such synthesized views can be distorted by quantization noise and inaccuracy of 3D wrapping positions, thus it is important to improve their quality where possible. To achieve this, the relationship among the depth video, texture video, and synthesized view is investigated herein. Based on this investigation, an edge noise suppression filtering process to preserve the edges of the depth video and a method based on a total variation approach to maximum a posteriori probability estimates for reducing the quantization noise of the coded texture video. The experiment results show that the proposed methods improve the peak signal-to-noise ratio and visual quality of a synthesized view compared to a synthesized view without post processing methods.