Three-Dimensional Image and Video Processing

Three-dimensional (3D) TV is expected to be the next revolution in the history of television. It has only recently become feasible to deal with the high processing and bandwidth requirements for real-time acquisition, transmission, and display of high-resolution 3D TV content. Moreover, capturing 3D scenery by using images and videos taken from different view points is now widely used both in film production for making a seamless fusion of real and virtual scenes and also in industrial applications for quality inspections and goods handling. Also in surveillance applications, the integration of data coming from different cameras are often used to extract 3D information on the imaged scenes/objects/persons. Although the technical requirements are more and more fulfilled for a commercial success, there is still a need of sophisticated algorithms to handle 3D image information. The amount of data is extremely high, requiring efficient techniques for coding, transmission, and processing. Similarly , the estimation of 3D geometry and other metadata from multiple views, the augmentation of real and synthetic scene content, and the estimation of 3D object or face/body motion has been addressed mainly for restricted scenarios but often lack robustness in a general environment. This special issue includes six papers dealing with the encoding, visualization, and analysis of 3D scenes. The first five papers address different aspects of a multiview coding system. Multiview coding (MVC) is an extension of the ISO/IEC MPEG4-AVC video coding standard aiming at an efficient encoding of a set of video sequences obtained by viewing the same scene from slightly different viewpoints. An application of MVC is the encoding of video sequences that will be displayed on autostereoscopic multiview displays that are becoming more and more popular and offer a simultaneous 3D immersive experience to a large group of users. Obviously when we consider the minimum number of views to guarantee the direct perception of 3D information, the multiview coding system reduces to a simple stereo coding system. The first paper from Peng et al. presents some innovative techniques that can be used for inter-and intraview motion estimations in MPEG4-MVC. The transmission of multiple coded views that are used to feed modern multiview autostereoscopic displays is very demanding due to the fact that usually a large number of video streams is required to guarantee optimal viewing quality from all directions. Therefore , there are several proposals in literature for limiting the number of transmitted video streams. At …