TR2007-073

Display Pre-filtering for Multi-view Video Compression
Citation: Zwicker, M.; Yea, S.; Vetro, A.; Forlines, C.; Matusik, W.; Pfister, H., "Display Pre-filtering for Multi-view Video Compression", International Conference on Multimedia (ACM Multimedia), ISBN: 978-1-59593-702-5, Session: Systems 4 - Coding Support - pp. 1046-1053, September 2007 (ACM Portal)
Date:April 2008
MERL Contacts:Sehoon Yea, Clifton Forlines, Anthony Vetro

Multi-view 3D displays are preferable to other stereoscopic display technologies because they provide autostereoscopic viewing from any viewpoint without special glasses. However, they require a large number of pixels to achieve high image quality. Therefore, data compression is a major issue for this approach. In this paper, we present a framework for efficient compression of mult-view video streams for multi-view 3D displays. Our goal is to optimize image quality without increasing the required data bandwidth. We achieve this by taking into account a precise notion of the multi-dimensional display bandwidth. The display band-width implies that scene elements that appear at a given distance from the display become increasingly blurry as the distance grows. Our main contribution is to enhance conventional multi-view compression pipelines with an additional pre-filtering step that bandlimits the multi-view signal to the display bandwidth. This imposes a shallow depth of field on the input images, thereby removing high frequency content. We show that this pre-filtering step leads to increased image quality compared to state-of-the-art multi-view coding at equal bitrate. We present results of an extensive user study that corroborate the benefits of our approach. Our work suggests that display pre-filtering will be a fundamental component in signal processing for 3D displays, and that any multi-view compression scheme will benefit from our pre-filtering technique.

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