Automatic 2D-to-3D video conversion technique based on depth-from-motion and color segmentation

Most of the TV manufacturers have released 3DTVs in the summer of 2010 using shutter-glasses technology. 3D video applications are becoming popular in our daily life, especially at home entertainment. Although more and more 3D movies are being made, 3D video contents are still not rich enough to satisfy the future 3D video market. There is a rising demand on new techniques for automatically converting 2D video content to stereoscopic 3D video displays. In this paper, an automatic monoscopic video to stereoscopic 3D video conversion scheme is presented using block-based depth from motion estimation and color segmentation for depth map enhancement. The color based region segmentation provides good region boundary information, which is used to fuse with block-based depth map for eliminating the staircase effect and assigning good depth value in each segmented region. The experimental results show that this scheme can achieve relatively high quality 3D stereoscopic video output.