Least MSE Regression for View Synthesis
View synthesis is the process of combining given multi-view images to generate an image from a new viewpoint. Assuming that each pixel of the new view is obtained as the weighted sum of the corresponding pixels from the input views, we focus on the problem of how to optimize the weight for each of the input views. Our weighting method is called least mean squared error (MSE) regression because it is formulated as a regression problem in which second order statistics among the viewpoints are exploited to minimize the MSE of the resulting image. More specifically, the affinity across the viewpoints is represented as a covariance and approximated using a linear model whose parameters are adapted for each dataset. By using the approximated covariance, the optimal weights can be successfully estimated. As a result, the weights derived using our method are data dependent and significantly differ from those obtained using current empirical methods such as distance penalty. Our method is still effective if the given correspondence is not completely accurate due to noise. We report on experimental results using several multi-view datasets to validate our theory and method.