To measure the influence of depth estimation error on depth coding and virtual view rendering in a free-viewpoint television(FTV) system,a multi-view depth estimation is proposed to solve the problem for coding and view synthesis.Firstly,the consistency of initial depth is checked and the influence of initial miss-matches is minimized by introducing an additional adaptive matching error that penalizes the unreliable matches.Then according to specific criteria,the multi-reference depth maps are m...