Object-based 2D-to-3D video conversion for effective stereoscopic content generation in 3D-TV applications

Three-dimensional television (3D-TV) has gained increasing popularity in the broadcasting domain, as it enables enhanced viewing experiences in comparison to conventional two-dimensional (2D) TV. However, its application has been constrained due to the lack of essential contents, i.e., stereoscopic videos. To alleviate such content shortage, an economical and practical solution is to reuse the huge media resources that are available in monoscopic 2D and convert them to stereoscopic 3D. Although stereoscopic video can be generated from monoscopic sequences using depth measurements extracted from cues like focus blur, motion and size, the quality of the resulting video may be poor as such measurements are usually arbitrarily defined and appear inconsistent with the real scenes. To help solve this problem, a novel method for object-based stereoscopic video generation is proposed which features i) optical-flow based occlusion reasoning in determining depth ordinal, ii) object segmentation using improved region-growing from masks of determined depth layers, and iii) a hybrid depth estimation scheme using content-based matching (inside a small library of true stereo image pairs) and depth-ordinal based regularization. Comprehensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of our proposed 2D-to-3D conversion method in generating stereoscopic videos of consistent depth measurements for 3D-TV applications

Cosmic cookery : making a stereoscopic 3D animated movie.

This paper describes our experience making a short stereoscopic movie visualizing the development of structure in the universe during the 13.7 billion years from the Big Bang to the present day. Aimed at a general audience for the Royal Society's 2005 Summer Science Exhibition, the movie illustrates how the latest cosmological theories based on dark matter and dark energy are capable of producing structures as complex as spiral galaxies and allows the viewer to directly compare observations from the real universe with theoretical results. 3D is an inherent feature of the cosmology data sets and stereoscopic visualization provides a natural way to present the images to the viewer, in addition to allowing researchers to visualize these vast, complex data sets. The presentation of the movie used passive, linearly polarized projection onto a 2m wide screen but it was also required to playback on a Sharp RD3D display and in anaglyph projection at venues without dedicated stereoscopic display equipment. Additionally lenticular prints were made from key images in the movie. We discuss the following technical challenges during the stereoscopic production process; 1) Controlling the depth presentation, 2) Editing the stereoscopic sequences, 3) Generating compressed movies in display speci¯c formats. We conclude that the generation of high quality stereoscopic movie content using desktop tools and equipment is feasible. This does require careful quality control and manual intervention but we believe these overheads are worthwhile when presenting inherently 3D data as the result is signi¯cantly increased impact and better understanding of complex 3D scenes

Image Completion for View Synthesis Using Markov Random Fields and Efficient Belief Propagation

View synthesis is a process for generating novel views from a scene which has been recorded with a 3-D camera setup. It has important applications in 3-D post-production and 2-D to 3-D conversion. However, a central problem in the generation of novel views lies in the handling of disocclusions. Background content, which was occluded in the original view, may become unveiled in the synthesized view. This leads to missing information in the generated view which has to be filled in a visually plausible manner. We present an inpainting algorithm for disocclusion filling in synthesized views based on Markov random fields and efficient belief propagation. We compare the result to two state-of-the-art algorithms and demonstrate a significant improvement in image quality.Comment: Published version: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=673843

An affordable surround-screen virtual reality display

Building a projection-based virtual reality display is a time, cost, and resource intensive enterprise andmany details contribute to the final display quality. This is especially true for surround-screen displays wheremost of them are one-of-a-kind systems or custom-made installations with specialized projectors, framing, andprojection screens. In general, the costs of acquiring these types of systems have been in the hundreds and evenmillions of dollars, specifically for those supporting synchronized stereoscopic projection across multiple screens.Furthermore, the maintenance of such systems adds an additional recurrent cost, which makes them hard to affordfor a general introduction in a wider range of industry, academic, and research communities.We present a low-cost, easy to maintain surround-screen design based on off-the-shelf affordable componentsfor the projection screens, framing, and display system. The resulting system quality is comparable to significantlymore expensive commercially available solutions. Additionally, users with average knowledge can implement ourdesign and it has the added advantage that single components can be individually upgraded based on necessity aswell as available funds

Atomic detail visualization of photosynthetic membranes with GPU-accelerated ray tracing

The cellular process responsible for providing energy for most life on Earth, namely, photosynthetic light-harvesting, requires the cooperation of hundreds of proteins across an organelle, involving length and time scales spanning several orders of magnitude over quantum and classical regimes. Simulation and visualization of this fundamental energy conversion process pose many unique methodological and computational challenges. We present, in two accompanying movies, light-harvesting in the photosynthetic apparatus found in purple bacteria, the so-called chromatophore. The movies are the culmination of three decades of modeling efforts, featuring the collaboration of theoretical, experimental, and computational scientists. We describe the techniques that were used to build, simulate, analyze, and visualize the structures shown in the movies, and we highlight cases where scientific needs spurred the development of new parallel algorithms that efficiently harness GPU accelerators and petascale computers