Reconstruction of intermediate views from stereoscopic images using a rational filter

Multimedia and virtual reality systems give the user the illusion of three-dimensional contact. Unsurprisingly, this requires the transmission of more data than the monocular case. To bring participants together in a virtual space, or to allow a user to "see around" a 3-D object it is necessary to synthesise intermediate views from a stereoscopic image pair or sequence. In a stereo/video coding scheme, a block-based disparity map is usually coded and transmitted. This format is economic in computation and transmission, but likely to cause artifacts an any reconstructed intermediate view. To minimise the distortion of the reconstructed intensities, a nonlinear interpolator, which uses the single disparity available to each block of the image, generates a full-sized map that partially preserves original disparity edge information producing a sharper intermediate view. The identification of occluded and non-occluded areas is also used to aid the intermediate view reconstruction.