3D Visual Communications

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3D Graphics and Rendering

With the advance of technology, stereoscopic 3DTV is now available and popular in the current electronics market. The fundamental concept of a 3DTV system is to deliver stereoscopic 3D perception of the world to viewers while watching streams of 2D videos. These 2D videos are sent to each eye separately and later the brain fuses them together to generate the perception of the world. In other words, 3DTV delivers the content of a 3D scene to consumers' 3D displayable devices for generating 3D perception to viewers. The 3D content may be virtual (synthesized by computers) or realistic (captured from real scenes) and can be transmitted in various ways and forms according to the types of the scene, the level of required realism, the type of applications, the available bandwidth of the transmission channel, and so on. The representations of the 3D scenes is the bridging technology among the procedures of scene extraction, modeling, transmission, and viewing for a 3DTV framework. However, the requirements of scene representations in each procedure are often very different and even sometimes conflicting (e.g., transmission rate versus visual quality). To achieve these different requirements, different 3D scene representation techniques are available and generally categorized into three fundamental classes according to whether geometric models are used or not:

1. Rendering with explicit geometry: The first category is rendering with explicit geometry which has ...