3D Visual Communications

1.2 End-to-End 3D Visual Ecosystem

As shown by the past experience and lessons learned from the development and innovation of visual systems, the key driving force is all about how to enrich the user experiences, or so-called QoE. The 3D visual system also faces the same issues. Although a 3D visual system provides a dramatic new user experience after traditional 2D systems, the QoE concept has to be considered at every stage of the communication system pipeline during system design and optimization work to ensure the worthwhileness of moving from 2D to 3D. There are many factors affecting the QoE, such as errors in multidimensional signal processing, lack of information, packet loss, and optical errors in display. Improperly addressing QoE issues will result in visual artifacts (objectively and subjectively), visual discomfort, fatigue, and other things that degrade the intended 3D viewing experiences.

An end-to-end 3D visual communication pipeline consists of the content creation, 3D representation, data compression, transmission, decompression, post-processing, and 3D display stages, which also reflects the lifecycle of a 3D video content in the system. We illustrate the whole pipeline and the corresponding major issues in Figure 1.2. In addition, we also show the possible feedback information from later stages to earlier stages for possible improvement of 3D scene reconstruction.

Figure 1.2 End-to-end 3D visual ecosystem.

The first stage of the whole pipeline is the content ...