Virtual Control of Optical Axis of the 3DTV Camera for Reducing Visual Fatigue in Stereoscopic 3DTV

In stereoscopic television, there is a trade-off between visual comfort and 3-dimensional (3D) impact with respect to the baseline-stretch of a 3DTV camera. It is necessary to adjust the baseline-stretch at an appropriate distance depending on the contents of a scene if we want to obtain a subjectively optimal quality of an image. However, it is very hard to obtain a small baseline-stretch using commercially available cameras of broadcasting quality where the sizes of the lens and CCD module are large. In order to overcome this limitation, we attempt to freely control the baseline-stretch of a stereoscopic camera by synthesizing the virtual views at the desired location of interval between two cameras. This proposed technique is based on the stereo matching and view synthesis techniques. We first obtain a dense disparity map using a hierarchical stereo matching with the edge-adaptive multiple shifted windows. Then, we synthesize the virtual views using the disparity map. Simulation results with various stereoscopic images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.