Real-Time Transmission of 3D Video to Multiple Users via Network

IEEE transactions on …, 2007

International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, 2010

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.

2002

Television production is increasingly making use of 3D models, in applications including animation and virtual production. These models are rendered to produce 2D images during the production process. However, with the ever increasing power of 3D graphics processors in home PCs, and new developments in 3D display technology, the time is right to consider how the broadcaster can maintain content in its 3D form all the way through the programme chain. This paper presents the results of PROMETHEUS, a UK 'LINK' project, whose aim is to examine the various issues related to developing an end-to-end 3D programme production chain using MPEG-4.

2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'05) - Workshops

In this paper, we describe a real-time 3D video system that is based on active stereo. Combining a NTSC standard camera/projector equipment and a suitable color code, the geometric and photometric information of a scene is robustly obtained in 30fps. Our main motivation to develop this system is to create a platform for investigating the issues that will be posed by the next generation of digital video and how it can shape up new media.

2011

In this work, we develop image processing and computer vision techniques for visually tracking a tennis ball, in 3D, on a court instrumented with multiple low-cost IP cameras. The technique first extracts 2D ball track data from each camera view, using object tracking methods. Next, an automatic featurebased video synchronization method is applied. This technique uses both the extracted 2D ball information from two or more camera views, plus camera calibration information. Then, in order to find 3D trajectory, the temporal 3D locations of the ball is estimated using triangulation of correspondent 2D locations obtained from automatically synchronized videos. Furthermore, we also incorporate a physics-based trajectory model into the system to improve the continuity of the tracked 3D ball during times when no two cameras have overlapping views of the ball location. The resultant 3D ball tracks are then visualized in a virtual 3D graphical environment. Finally, we quantify the accuracy of our system in terms of reprojection error.

Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2013

For a Technical Director (TD) in charge of a live broadcasting, selecting the best camera shots among the available video sources is a challenging task, even more now that the number of cameras (some of them mobile, or attached to moving objects) in the broadcasting of sport events is increasing. So, the TD needs to manage a great amount of continuously changing information to quickly select the camera whose view should be broadcasted. Besides, the better the decisions made by the TD, the more interesting the content for the audience. Therefore, the development of systems that could help the TD with the selection of camera views is demanded by broadcasting organizations.

Stereoscopic Displays and Applications XIX, 2008

3D-Video systems allow a user to perceive depth in the viewed scene and to display the scene from arbitrary viewpoints interactively and on-demand. This paper presents a prototype implementation of a 3D-video streaming system using an IP network. The architecture of our streaming system is layered, where each information layer conveys a single coded video signal or coded scene-description data. We demonstrate the benefits of a layered architecture with two examples: (a) stereoscopic video streaming, (b) monoscopic video streaming with remote multiple-perspective rendering. Our implementation experiments confirm that prototyping 3D-video streaming systems is possible with today's software and hardware. Furthermore, our current operational prototype demonstrates that highly heterogeneous clients can coexist in the system, ranging from auto-stereoscopic 3D displays to resource-constrained mobile devices.

Proceedings Korea-France Workshop on …, 1998

Image coding standards usually focus on storing and transmitting signals efficiently, in a frame based approach. The coming MPEG-4 standard [1] adds a new challenge, namely bringing new services to image communication users. It moves towards representing a scene as a composition of audiovisual objects rather than "just" a collection of pixels.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics - TVCG, 2009

The system described in this paper provides a real-time 3D visual experience by using an array of 64 video cameras and an integral photography display with 60 viewing directions. The live 3D scene in front of the camera array is reproduced by the full-color, full-parallax autostereoscopic display with interactive control of viewing parameters. The main technical challenge is fast and flexible conversion of the data from the 64 multicamera images to the integral photography format. Based on image-based rendering techniques, our conversion method first renders 60 novel images corresponding to the viewing directions of the display, and then arranges the rendered pixels to produce an integral photography image. For real-time processing on a single PC, all the conversion processes are implemented on a GPU with GPGPU techniques. The conversion method also allows a user to interactively control viewing parameters of the displayed image for reproducing the dynamic 3D scene with desirable parameters. This control is performed as a software process, without reconfiguring the hardware system, by changing the rendering parameters such as the convergence point of the rendering cameras and the interval between the viewpoints of the rendering cameras.

2011 International Conference on 3D Imaging (IC3D), 2011

This paper presents a methodology for obtaining a 3D reconstruction of a dynamic scene in multi-camera settings. Our target is to derive a compact representation of the 3D scene which is effective and accurate, whatever the number of cameras and even for very-wide baseline settings. Easing realtime 3D scene capture has outstanding applications in 2D and 3D content production, free viewpoint video of natural scenes and interactive video applications. The method proposed here has several original contributions on how to accelerate the process: it exploits spatial and temporal consistency for speeding up reconstruction, dividing the problem in two parts. First, 3D surfaces are efficiently sampled to obtain a silhouette-consistent set of colored surface points and normals, using a novel algorithm presented in this paper. Then, a fast, greedy meshing algorithm retrieves topologically correct continuous surfaces from the dense sets of oriented points, providing a suitable representation for multi-view video. Compared to other techniques in the literature, the presented approach is capable of retrieving 3D surfaces of foreground objects in real-time by exploiting the computing capabilities of GPUs. This is feasible due to the parallelized design of the surface sampling algorithm. The reconstructed surfaces can effectively be used for interactive representations. The presented methodology also offers good scalability to large multi-view video settings.