3D Visual Communications

Preface

As the Avatar 3D movie experience swept the world in 2010, 3D visual content has become the most eye-catching spot in the consumer electronics products. This 3D visual wave has spread to 3DTV, Blu-ray, PC, mobile, and gaming industries, as the 3D visual system provides sufficient depth cues for end users to acquire better understanding of the geometric structure of the captured scenes, and nonverbal signals and cues in visual conversation. In addition, 3D visual systems enable observers to recognize the physical layout and location for each object with immersive viewing experiences and natural user interaction, which also makes it an important topic for both academic and industrial researchers.

Living in an era of widespread mobility and networking, where almost all consumer electronic devices are endpoints of the wireless/wired networks, the deployment of 3D visual representation will significantly challenge the network bandwidth as well as the computational capability of terminal points. In other words, the data volume received in an endpoint required to generate 3D views will be many times that of a single view in a 2D system, and hence the new view generation process sets a higher requirement for the endpoint's computational capability. Emerging 4G communication systems fit very well into the timing of 3D visual communications by significantly improving the bandwidth as well as introducing many new features designed specifically for high-volume data communications. ...