Stereoscopic demultiplexing of field-sequential video

Abstract

Much research has been devoted to investigating the generation of stereoscopic video based on catadioptric stereo systems. These systems, which utilize a proper combination of mirrors and lens, can capture stereoscopic video using only one camera. The left and right images are usually multiplexed to generate an interlaced video where each image corresponds to one field. This field-sequential format unavoidably reduces vertical resolution of the image pair by half. We proposed a notion called stereoscopic demultiplexing (SD) to recover the original resolution of the image pairs from the field-sequential video. To increase the sharpness of the image and avoid jagged artifacts, interpolation along the edge direction is emphasized. Because the SD problem is similar to deinterlacing, several methods previously used in deinterlacing were evaluated, and a new edge adaptive interpolation (EAI) approach was proposed. This new method can estimate edge direction with higher accuracy and obtain better image quality. Several experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other popular deinterlacing methods both visually and quantitatively. Since resolution of the display technology is higher and better than that of current catadioptric stereo systems, we believe that further improvement in the resolution of the acquisition device by software is necessary to make 3-D applications more economical and popular.