Three-dimensional dictionary-based deblocking for high-quality stereoscopic view generation

Image quality and depth perception rates in three-dimensional television (3-D TV) are undesirably decreased by coding due to the loss of high-frequency components caused by a block-based discrete cosine transform transform. Representative coding artifacts are blocking artifacts that seriously degrade the picture quality and depth perception rates. We propose a new blocking artifact reduction method in 3-D TV using an overcomplete 3-D dictionary. We first generate the overcomplete 3-D dictionary from natural and depth images using the k-singular value decomposition algorithm. Then, we perform deblocking using the 3-D dictionary after estimating an error threshold of the objective function by the third-order polynomial fitting. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively reduce annoying blocking artifacts in compressed 3-D images, i.e., video-plus-depth, and generate high-quality 3-D stereoscopic views. (C) 2013 SPIE and IS&T