Adaptive estimation of depth map for two-dimensional to three-dimensional stereoscopic conversion

With increasing demands of three-dimensional (3D) contents, the conversion of many two-dimensional (2D) contents to 3D contents has become a focus in 3D image processing. The most important and difficult problem in 2D-to-3D conversion is the estimation of the depth map using only a single-view image. Therefore, a novel method for estimating a depth map for stereoscopic conversion is proposed in this paper. A simulated haze image generated by adding a haze veil on the input image is used to represent salient region segmentation. The 3D stereoscopic image is generated on the basis of the depth map estimated by the haze removal algorithm without any heuristic cues or user interaction. A comparative study and quantitative evaluation with some other state of the art conversion methods are carried out, which demonstrate that using the proposed approach, similar or better-quality results may be obtained. (C) 2014 The Japan Society of Applied Physics