Towards a 3D Video Format for Auto-Stereoscopic Displays

There has been increased momentum recently in the production of 3D content for cinema applications; for the most part, this has been limited to stereo content. There are also a variety of display technologies on the market that support 3DTV, each offering a different viewing experience and having different input requirements. More specifically, stereoscopic displays support stereo content and require glasses, while auto-stereoscopic displays avoid the need for glasses by rending view-dependent stereo pairs for a multitude of viewing angles. To realize high quality auto-stereoscopic displays, multiple views of the video must either be provided as input to the display, or these views must be created locally at the display. The former approach has difficulties in that the production environment is typically limited to stereo, and transmission bandwidth for a large number of views is not likely to be available. This paper discusses an emerging 3D data format that enables the latter approach to be realized. A new framework for efficiently representing a 3D scene and enabling the reconstruction of an arbitrarily large number of views prior to rendering is introduced. Several design challenges are also highlighted through experimental results. SPIE Conference on Applications of Digital Image Processing XXXI This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright c ©Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc., 2008 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139