3D Visual Communications

7.1 3D Artifacts

3D artifacts are the distortions introduced during the whole content production and consumption pipeline [2, 3]. Those artifacts degrade the perception of 3D content and should be removed or alleviated as much as possible at each stage of the 3D pipeline. In this section, the artifacts induced at the stage of coordinate transformations from the real 3D world coordinate to the camera coordinate and from the camera coordinate to the display coordinate are discussed. Thereafter, artifacts induced by the different 3D camera settings and display designs are introduced. Besides, the artifacts induced during the content distribution process, such as compression and transmission, are addressed. At the end, the artifacts generated by the synthesis of new views are introduced when advanced 3D video coding technologies are involved.

7.1.1 Fundamentals of 3D Human Visual System

As discussed in Chapter 3, there are mainly two different categories of depth cues for the human to perceive depth, namely, monocular and binocular. Binocular cues, which require both eyes to perceive, are the fundamental design elements along the whole 3D content consumption pipeline. Figure 7.1 illustrates how the brain constructs binocular vision. The horizontal distance between the left and right eye is known as the interocular distance. By a given observed object, for human visual system (HVS) to perceive the depth, 3D points in the world are projected onto each eye's retina. Note that the projected ...