A novel key-frame extraction method for semi-automatic 2D-to-3D video conversion

Semi-automatic 2D-to-3D conversion becomes very popular in 3D contents creation due to its advantages over balancing the tradeoff between labor cost and 3D conversion effect. However, the key-frame extraction, as a very important step, has not been specifically put forward in the existing systems. In this paper, a novel key-frame extraction method based on cumulative occlusion is proposed for 2D-to-3D system. An input long color video is first segmented into several shots by using the block-based histogram difference. Then shot filtering is performed by several principles which are specific in 2D-to-3D system. After shot segmentation, for each shot, the cumulative occlusion curve is computed, according to which key-frames are selected. Objective evaluation shows that, compared with the previous methods, the proposed key-frame selection algorithm can keep depth errors of all frames in the whole video controlled in a lower level. And the good propagated depth maps indicate that our proposed schemes can be used for most semi-automatic 2D-to-3D systems.