A novel three-dimensional gray-level interpolation method called the Directional Coherence Interpolation (DCI) is presented in the paper. The principal advantage of the proposed approach is that it leads to significantly higher visual quality in 3D rendering when compared with traditional image interpolation methods. The basis of DCI is a form of directional image-space coherence. DCI interpolates the missing image data along the maximum coherence directions (MCD), which are estimated from the local image intensity yet constrained by a generic smoothness term. In order to further improve both the algorithm efficiency and robustness, we also propose to apply a pyramidal search strategy for MCD estimation. This coarse-to-fine scheme requires less computation time by starting with the reduced amount of data and propagating searching results to finer resolutions. DCI can incorporate image shape and structure information without the prior requirement of explicit representation of object boundary/surface. Extensive experiments were performed on both synthetic and real medical images to evaluate the proposed approaches. The experimental results show that the proposed methods are able to handle general object interpolation, while achieving both accuracy and efficiency in interpolation compared with the existing techniques.

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