Pseudo-stereo Conversion from 2D Video

In this paper, we propose a fast and effective pseudo-stereo conversion algorithm to transform the conventional 2D videos into their stereo versions. As conventional 2D videos do not normally have sufficient true depth information for stereo conversion, we explore the principle of extracting the closest disparity to reconstruct the stereo frame pair, where a simple content-based approach is followed. The proposed algorithm features in: (i) original 2D video frame is taken as the reference frame; (ii) closest disparity information is extracted by a texture-based matching inside a library of stereo image pairs; and (iii) the extracted disparity is then used to reconstruct the right video frame to complete the pseudo-stereo conversion. Our experiments show that certain level of stereo effect has been achieved, where all test video clips are publicly available on the Internet for the convenience of repetition of our proposed work.