3D Video Recorder: a System for Recording and Playing Free-Viewpoint Video
Authors: Würmlin S.1; Lamboray E.1; Staadt O.G.2; Gross M.H.1
Source: Computer Graphics Forum, Volume 22, Number 2, June 2003 , pp. 181-193(13)
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
Abstract:
We present the 3D Video Recorder, a system capable of recording, processing, and playing three-dimensional video from multiple points of view. We first record 2D video streams from several synchronized digital video cameras and store pre-processed images to disk. An off-line processing stage converts these images into a time-varying 3D hierarchical point-based data structure and stores this 3D video to disk. We show how we can trade-off 3D video quality with processing performance and devise efficient compression and coding schemes for our novel 3D video representation. A typical sequence is encoded at less than 7 Mbps at a frame rate of 8.5 frames per second. The 3D video player decodes and renders 3D videos from hard-disk in real-time, providing interaction features known from common video cassette recorders, like variable-speed forward and reverse, and slow motion. 3D video playback can be enhanced with novel 3D video effects such as freeze-and-rotate and arbitrary scaling. The player builds upon point-based rendering techniques and is thus capable of rendering high-quality images in real-time. Finally, we demonstrate the 3D Video Recorder on multiple real-life video sequences. ACM CSS: I.3.2 Computer GraphicsGraphics Systems, I.3.5 Computer GraphicsComputational Geometry and Object Modelling, I.3.7 Computer GraphicsThree-Dimensional Graphics and RealismKeywords: Point-Based Rendering; Object Reconstruction; Three-Dimensional Video; Compression
Document Type: Research article
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8659.00659
Affiliations: 1: 1Computer Science Department, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland 2: 2Computer Science Department, University of California Davis, CA, USA

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