Rectification with Intersecting Optical Axes for Stereoscopic Visualization

There exist various methods for stereoscopic viewing of images, most requiring some special glasses for controlling what goes to the left and the right eyes of the viewer. Recent technology developments have resulted in displays that enable 3D viewing without glasses. However, these displays demand a true stereo pair as the input, which greatly limits their practical use, as true stereoscopic media are scarce. In our recent work (Zhou and Li, 2006), we developed a systematic approach to automatic rectification of two images of the same scene captured by cameras at general positions, so that the results can be viewed on a 3D display. However, the approach cannot work well for large camera displacement (i.e., very wide baseline). In this paper, we propose a new rectification scheme to address this wise baseline rectification problem, with the basic idea of using a special stereo setup with intersecting optical axes. In a sense, the idea mimics human vision when viewing objects close to the eyes. Experiments with a 3D display demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach