Virtual 3D-view generation from stereoscopic video data

Multi viewpoint synthesis from stereoscopic video data is a key technology in most emerging content based multimedia systems. The different techniques presented in the article are based on the analysis of 2D images acquired by two or more cameras. It is shown, how suitable analysis tools for disparity estimation and segmentation can benefit from each other. For the generation of virtual images, two methods with different levels of trade-off between complexity and degree of freedom are described. The first approach is disparity compensated view interpolation, which is capable of generating intermediate views along the interocular axis. The second is a more complex approach, which in a first step generates a 3D model of the object. This model can be rotated to any orientation, the original texture is mapped onto the surface, and arbitrary views can be generated by rendering the obtained surface