Advances in 3DTV: Theory and Practice

Copyright © 2010 Xenophon Zabulis et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Being a goal over decades, the extension of television, and visual communications in general, to the third dimension (3DTV) has been almost reached. Currently, 3D motion pictures are shown in theatres and the first 3D broadcasts are being planned to initiate in the next few years. Albeit the progress, state of the art has not yet reached the goal of acquiring a three-dimensional scene in full detail and creating a precise optical duplicate at remote site in real-time. Limitations in reconstruction accuracy and visual quality as well as user acceptance of pertinent technologies have, to date, prevented the creation of infrastructures for the delivery of 3D content to mass markets. Thereby, relevant scientific research is at the center of interest regarding the improvement of current 3DTV technologies. The goal of 3DTV involves the collaboration of researchers in multiple scientific disciplines as well as the integration of pertinent results, in order to provide end-users with a fully functional system. The tasks of " capture and representation of 3D scene information, " " representation of the digital 3DTV signal, " " storage and transmission of the digital 3DTV signal, " as well as " display of the reproduced 3D scene " constitute a chain of operations that are essential for reaching this goal. In this context, this special issue presents contributions along the whole chain of computational tasks that are required to implement 3DTV. In addition, the last two papers provide with contributions that go beyond the simple presentation of 3D visual data and propose ways of interacting with them. The paper " Multi-view shooting geometry for mul-tiscopic rendering with controlled distortion " introduces a complete analysis of the geometrical quality of 3D content. The article compares the perceived depth with scene depth obtained from the viewing and shooting (acquisition) geometries, yielding a depth distortion model whose parameters are expressed by the geometrical characteristics of shooting and rendering devices. These expressions are then inverted, in order to design convenient shooting layouts yielding chosen distortions on specific rendering devices. The paper " Near real time estimation of super-resolved depth and all-in-focus images from a plenoptic camera using graphic processing units (GPU), " provides a near real-time …