Directional interpolation for field-sequential stereoscopic video

Catadioptric stereo systems, which utilize proper combinations of mirrors and lenses, can be designed to capture stereoscopic video using only one camera. The left and right images are usually multiplexed to generate an interlaced video with each image corresponding to one field. This field-sequential format unavoidably reduces the vertical resolution of the image pair by half. We propose a notion called stereoscopic demultiplexing (SD) to recover the original resolution of the image pairs from the field-sequential video. In order to increase the sharpness of the image and avoid jagged artifacts, interpolation along the edge direction is emphasized and a new edge adaptive interpolation (EAI) approach is proposed. Since resolution of the display technology is higher and better than that of the current catadioptric stereo systems, we believe that further improvement on resolution of the acquisition device by software is necessary to make 3D applications become more economical and popular.