Stereoscopic cinema has seen a surge of activity in recent years, and for the first time all of the major Hollywood studios released 3-D movies in 2009. This is happening alongside the adoption of 3-D technology for sports broadcasting, and the arrival of 3-D TVs for the home. Two previous attempts to introduce 3-D cinema in the 1950s and the 1980s failed because the contemporary technology was immature and resulted in viewer discomfort. But current technologies — such as accurately-adjustable 3-D camera rigs with onboard computers to automatically inform a camera operator of inappropriate stereoscopic shots, digital processing for post-shooting rectification of the 3-D imagery, digital projectors for accurate positioning of the two stereo projections on the cinema screen, and polarized silver screens to reduce cross-talk between the viewers left- and right-eyes — mean that the viewer experience is at a much higher level of quality than in the past. Even so, creation of stereoscopic cinema is an open, active research area, and there are many challenges from acquisition to post-production to automatic adaptation for different-sized display..
A description of past, ongoing and future research projects that I pursued in this field are available in a presentation from July 2011.
Our research focuses on algorithms derived from Computer Vision and Computer Graphics, applied to live-action stereoscopic 3-D content production or post-production, including:
Feel free to send me an email if you are interested on discussing or working on any of these subjects.
A large bibliography on this subject, with abstracts, keywords, and links to original articles, is available as a HTML or BibTeX file.
F. Devernay and P. Beardsley, Stereoscopic Cinema, in Image and Geometry Processing for 3-D Cinematography, Remi Ronfard and Gabriel Taubin (eds.)., 5:11-51, Geometry and Computing, 2, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-12392-4_2 (HAL, PDF).
F. Devernay, S. Duchêne, and A. Ramos-Peon, Adapting stereoscopic movies to the viewing conditions using depth-preserving and artifact-free novel view synthesis, Stereoscopic Displays & Applications XXII, Woods, Holliman and Dogson (eds.), Proc. SPIE 7863, paper 7863-1, 2011. doi:10.1117/12.872883 (HAL, PDF, slides).
F. Devernay and A. Ramos-Peon, Novel View Synthesis for Stereoscopic Cinema: Detecting and Removing Artifacts, in 3DVP 2010: ACM Workshop on 3D Video Processing, ACM, Firenze, Italy, 2010. doi:10.1145/1877791.1877798 (HAL, PDF).
F. Devernay and S. Duchêne, New View Synthesis for Stereo Cinema by Hybrid Disparity Remapping, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Image Processing, IEEE, Hong Kong, 2010. doi:10.1109/ICIP.2010.5649194 (HAL, PDF, slides).
3D Cinema and Television Technology: The First 100 Years - Selected Papers on Stereoscopy from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), Michael D. Smith, Peter Ludé and Bill Hogan (Eds.), SMPTE, 2011. (online, buy).
Conferences are flourishing on this subject. Stereoscopic Displays and Applications (SDA) is still the best place to hold scientific discussions with researchers on stereoscopic-related subjects. SIGGRAPH has a few high-quality papers on the subject every year, and CVMP is a good place to meet both researchers and industrials working on stereoscopic movie production.
This work was done with the help of the following people:
These results were partially funded by the following projects: