System architecture for free-viewpoint video and 3D-TV

This paper presents a system architecture of an acquisition, compression and rendering system for 3D- TV and free-viewpoint video applications. We show that the proposed system yields two distinct advantages. First, it achieves an efficient compression of 3D/multi-view video by extending a standard H.264 encoder such that near backward compatibility is retained. Second, the proposed system can efficiently compress both 3D-TV and free- viewpoint multi-view video datasets using the single proposed system architecture.