Simultaneous dual-subtitles exhibition via Spatial Psychovisual Modulation

Dual-language annotation for in-theatre movie exhibition is a useful technique to facilitate the understanding of the movie for audiences from different nations and with different cultural backgrounds. Currently, the most popular solution is the direct superimposition of subtitles in a pair of different languages over the movie, e.g. English + Chinese which can often be seen in cinema in China today. An obvious drawback of this straightforward solution is that the subtitle area often occludes the movie contents and even becomes annoying for the audience. In this paper, we propose a new Spatial Psychovisual Modulation (SPVM) based solution to the dual-language subtitling problem. SPVM is a new paradigm of information display exploiting the mismatch between high resolution of the modern optoelectronic displays and limited spatial resolution of the human visual system (HVS). In this work, we design a simultaneous dual-subtitle exhibition system using 2 synchronized projectors with linear polarization filters and polarization glasses. Most audiences can enjoy the movie as usual with a default subtitle language, say English, while others have the option of only seeing subtitle in the other language, e.g. Chinese using the polarization glasses. We have implemented the system and experimental results will be demonstrated to justify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed dual-subtitle exhibition system.