Abstract
3D experience and free-viewpoint navigation are expected to be two essential features of next generation television. In this paper, we present a flexible 3DTV system in which multiview video streams are captured, compressed, transmitted, and finally converted to high-quality 3D video in real time. Our system consists of an camera array, 16 producer PCs, a streaming server, multiple clients, and several autostereoscopic displays. The whole system is implemented over IP network to provide multiple users with interactive 2D/3D switching, viewpoint control, and synthesis for dynamic scenes. In our approach, multiple video streams are first captured by a synchronized camera array. Then, we adopt a lengthened-B-field and region of interest- (ROI-) based coding scheme to guarantee a seamless view switching for each user as well as saving per-user transmission bandwidth. Finally, a convenient rendering algorithm is used to synthesize a visually pleasing result by introducing a new metric called Clarity Degree (CD). Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data have verified the feasibility, flexibility, and good performance of our system.
Highlights
Television has greatly changed our life since its invention as early as 1920s [1]
We present a client-driven 3DTV system with a camera array over IP network
We proposed a flexible client-driven 3DTV system to offer multiple users a 3D view experience over IP network
Summary
Television has greatly changed our life since its invention as early as 1920s [1]. After the era of analog TV, digital TV has become more and more popular as a revolution because of its high-quality viewing experience. NHK-STRL reported a stereoscopic 3D-HDTV system in 1999 [3], “sensation of reality” is mentioned by increasing spatial resolution and widening the viewing angle Another 3D-HDTV experiment was the broadcast of the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Korea [4]. Many stereoscopic cameras were tested in this experiment These 3DTV attempts are very valuable for evaluating visual and psychological effects but their viewpoint cannot be interactively controlled and the coding and streaming mechanism only takes into account two video streams (left and right eyes). Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) setup a prototype 3DTV system with 16 cameras and a multiprojector display which can show high-resolution stereoscopic color images for multiple viewpoints without special glasses [5]. The N-view-plus-depth concept is very suitable for rendering new views and generating a 3D scene This scheme is backward-compatible with current 2D digital TV. Image-based rendering (IBR) has drawn much attention because it offers a novel alternative to conventional model-based rendering by creating a photographic realistic dynamic scene just from captured images
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