Vision field capturing and its applications in 3DTV

3D video capturing acquires the visual information in 3D manner, which possesses the first step of the entire 3DTV system chain before 3D coding, transmission and visualization. The 3D capturing plays an important role because precise 3D visual capturing will benefit the whole 3DTV system. During the past decades, various kinds of capturing system have been built for different applications such as FTV[1], 3DTV, 3D movie, etc. As the cost of sensors reduces in recent years, a lot of systems utilize multiple cameras to acquire visual information, which is called multiview capturing. 3D information can be further extracted through multiview geometry. We will first give a brief review of these multiview systems and analyze their relationship from the perspective of plenoptic function [2]. Along with the multiple cameras, a lot of systems also make use of multiple lights to control the illumination condition. A new concept of vision field is presented in this talk according to the view-light-time subspace, which can be derived from the plenoptic function. The features and applications for each capturing system will be emphasized as well as the important issues in capturing like synchronization and calibration. Besides the multiple camera systems, some new techniques using TOF (time-off-light) camera [3] and 3D scanner will also be included in this talk.