3D-TV Content generation and multi-view video coding

• Main Author: Talebpourazad, Mahsa
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2010
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/25949

The success of the 3D technology and the speed at which it will penetrate the entertainment market will depend on how well the challenges faced by the 3D-broadcasting system are resolved. The three main 3D-broadcasting system components are 3D content generation, 3D video transmission and 3D display. One obvious challenge is the unavailability of a wide variety of 3D content. Thus, besides generating new 3D-format videos, it is equally important to convert existing 2D material to the 3D format. This is because the generation of new 3D content is highly demanding and in most cases, involves post-processing correction algorithms. Another major challenge is that of transmitting a huge amount of data. This problem becomes much more severe in the case of multiview video content. This thesis addresses three aspects of the 3D-broadcasting system challenges. Firstly, the problem of converting 2D acquired video to a 3D format is addressed. Two new and efficient methods were proposed, which exploit the existing relationship between the motion of objects and their distance from the camera, to estimate the depth map of the scene in real-time. These methods can be used at the transmitter and receiver-ends. It is especially advantageous to employ them at the receiver-end since they do not increase the transmission bandwidth requirements. Performance evaluations show that our methods outperform the other existing technique by providing better depth approximation and thus a better 3D visual effect. Secondly, we studied one of the problems caused by unsynchronized zooming in stereo-camera video acquisition. We developed an effective algorithm for correcting unsynchronized zoom in 3D videos. The proposed scheme finds corresponding pairs of pixels between the left and right views and the relationship between them. This relationship is used to estimate the amount of scaling and translation needed to align the views. Experimental results show our method produces videos with negligible scale difference and vertical parallax. Lastly, the transmission of 3D-content problem is addressed and two schemes for multiview video coding (MVC) are proposed. While both methods outperform the current MVC standard, one of them introduces significantly less random access delay compared to the MVC standard. === Applied Science, Faculty of === Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of === Graduate