Three-Dimensional Video Contents Exploitation in Depth Camera-Based Hybrid Camera System

Video-plus-depth is an image sequence of synchronized color and depth images. As importance of video-plus-depth increases as an essential part of the next-generation multimedia applications, it is crucial to estimate accurate depth information from a real scene and to find a practical framework to use the immersive video in industry. In this chapter, we introduce a hybrid camera system composed of a stereoscopic camera and a time-of-flight depth camera to generate high-quality and high-resolution video-plus-depth. We also handle a hierarchical decomposition method of depth images to render a dynamic 3D scene represented by video-plus-depth rapidly. Finally, we present a method to generate streamable 3D video contents based on video-plus-depth and computer graphic models in the MPEG-4 multimedia framework. The MPEG-4-based 3D video contents can support a variety of user-friendly interactions, such as free viewpoint changing and free composition with computer graphic images.