Image Processing Reference
In-Depth Information
On the other hand, autostereoscopic techniques, which do not require any special
eyewear, have also been brought up as candidates for future 3D display solutions.
Among these solutions, the most likely to appear in a second step of 3DTV
development is the multiview approach, which allows seeing a discrete number
of perspectives of the scene with horizontal parallax. However, both stereoscopic
and multiview approaches can lead to considerable visual discomfort that may
inhibit their usage for applications that require prolonged observation periods.
In this context, 3D holoscopic imaging, also known as integral, light-field, and
plenoptic imaging, has become an attractive alternative for providing 3D content
and enabling a fatigue-free 3D visualization. Furthermore, following the recent
improvements in micro-lenses manufacturing, image sensors, and flat display
devices, 3D holoscopic imaging is turning into a practical technology and promises
to become popular in the future.
Besides the aforementioned advantages of 3D holoscopic imaging, there are
several critical success factors which need to be considered in order to introduce
this technology into the consumer electronics market for 3DTV applications,
notably: coding efficiency, bandwidth requirements, receiver types (fixed, mobile,
etc.), quality of experience, as well as backward compatibility with legacy 2D
devices. These factors are closely related to all stages of the 3DTV chain—
acquisition, representation, coding, transmission, reception, and display—and are
analyzed in this chapter with special emphasis on the representation and coding
stages, so as to efficiently deliver 3D holoscopic content to the end-users.
As an insightful example, this chapter presents a display scalable coding scheme
for 3D holoscopic content. In this scheme, a multi-layer display scalable architec-
ture is used, where each layer represents a different level of display scalability:
Layer 0—a single 2D view; Layer 1—3D stereo or multiview; and Layer 2—the
full 3D holoscopic content. Furthermore, novel prediction methods are used to
improve the coding efficiency by taking advantage of the redundancy existing
between multiview and 3D holoscopic content, as well as of the inherent correlation
of the 3D holoscopic content.
The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: Section
5.2
overviews the
principles behind the 3D holoscopic imaging approach and discusses quality of
experience issues that still need to be overcome. Section
5.3
presents possible
representation formats for 3D holoscopic content and also reviews some algorithms
that can be used to generate 2D and multiview from 3D holoscopic content.
Section
5.4
describes the display scalable coding solution for 3D holoscopic
content. Section
5.5
presents some experimental results and, finally, Section
5.6
concludes the chapter.
