Toward a stereoscopic encoder/decoder for digital cinema

The digital cinema is very challenging because it represents tomorrow way of capturing, post-producing and projecting movies. Specifications on this media are provided by DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives) founded by the Hollywood Majors. Among the specifications we can find issues about resolution, bitrate, JPEG2000 compression Moreover, the market assumes that 3D could raise the turnover of cinema industry. The problem with is the availability of 2 streams (left and right) that double the amount of data and need adapted devices to decode and project movies. Cinema industry, represented by the stereoscopic group in SMPTE has expressed the need of having a unique master that combines two streams in one. This paper focuses on the study of the generation of a master with one of the streams and the embedment of the redundant information as metadata in JPEG2000 code-stream or MXF. The idea is to use the reference image in addition to some metadata to reconstruct the target image. The metadata represent the residual image and the contours description. Quality of reconstructed images depends on the compression ratio of the residual image. The obtained results are encouraging and the choice between JPEG2000 metadata embedding and MXF metadata still to be done.