A European consortium has been working since September 2004 on all video-based technical aspects of threedimensional television. The group has structured its technical activities under five technical committees focusing on capturing 3D live scenes, converting the captured scenes to an abstract 3D representations, transmitting the 3D visual information, displaying the 3D video, and processing of signals for the conversion of the abstract 3D video to signals needed to drive the display. The display of 3D video signals by holographic means is highly desirable. Synthesis of high-resolution computer generated holograms with high spatial frequency content, using fast algorithms, is crucial. Fresnel approximation with its fast implementations, fast superposition of zonelens terms, look-up tables using pre-computed holoprimitives are reported in the literature. Phase-retrieval methods are also under investigation. Successful solutions to this problem will benefit from proper utilization and adaptation of signal processing tools like waveletes, fresnelets, chirplets, and atomic decompositions and various optimization algorithms like matching pursuit or simulated annealing.Keywords: 3DTV, holographic TV, dynamic holographic displays
TECHNICAL SCOPE OF THE 3DTV PROJECTA European consortium has been working since September 2004 on all video-based technical aspects of threedimensional television (3DTV) [1]. The group has structured its technical activities under five technical committees. These technical committees are focusing on capturing 3D live scenes, converting the captured scenes to abstract 3D representations, transmitting the 3D visual information, displaying the 3D video, and processing of signals for the conversion of the abstract 3D video to signals needed to drive the display. The technical scope is kept rather wide: the researchers are investigating many different competing technologies for each one of the technical components of the overall 3DTV system in a comparative approach. Fig. 1 shows the main functional blocks.Multi-camera systems are quite popular among the alternative approaches to acquire 3D moving scene information. Typical multi-camera systems have 2-20 cameras providing synchronized video streams. Calibration is an issue. Typically, the images of a point in the 3D scene at an instant is located in more than one view captured by the cameras, and the true 3D physical coordinates are then computed from this information. Automated matching of feature points is a research topic. Holographic recording of 3D scene information using digital cameras is also under investigation as a candidate technology.Once the 3D geometry is captured, together with its color texture, the captured scene can be represented using various computer graphics techniques; for example, mesh polygons may be used. An important step is the compression and coding of the captured 3D motion pictures. Compression of 2D video has been well studied during the past three decades. However, extensions to stereo-video, or multi-view v...