3D cinema to 3DTV content adaptation

3D cinema and 3DTV have grown in popularity in recent years. Filmmakers have a significant opportunity in front of them given the recent success of 3D films. In this paper we investigate whether this opportunity could be extended to the home in a meaningful way. "3D" perceived from viewing stereoscopic content depends on the viewing geometry. This implies that the stereoscopic-3D content should be captured for a specific viewing geometry in order to provide a satisfactory 3D experience. However, although it would be possible, it is clearly not viable, to produce and transmit multiple streams of the same content for different screen sizes. In this study to solve the above problem, we analyze the performance of six different disparity-based transformation techniques, which could be used for cinema-to-3DTV content conversion. Subjective tests are performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithms in terms of depth effect, visual comfort and overall 3D quality. The resultant 3DTV experience is also compared to that of cinema. We show that by applying the proper transformation technique on the content originally captured for cinema, it is possible to enhance the 3DTV experience. The selection of the appropriate transformation is highly dependent on the content characteristics.