OCCLUSION-GUIDED VERTICAL RETARGETING FOR STEREOSCOPIC IMAGES BASED ON PIXEL FUSION

To implement vertical retargeting for stereoscopic images, this paper proposes an occlusion-guided stereoscopic image retargeting method via the pixel fusion technique. Traditional seam searching-based methods cannot construct valid horizontal seam pairs due to the existence of occluded regions in stereoscopic images and thus fail to implement vertical retargeting. To solve this issue, we propose a novel horizontal seam coupling strategy guided by the occlusion regions that appear on both sides of stereoscopic images. Horizontal seams were able to be laid across the occluded and occluding regions with their geometric consistency maintained. Another important contribution of our method is incorporating occluding masks into energy optimization. The experimental results show that our method can achieve promising performances in both visual experience and depth preservation.