Advanced Image Processing For Immersive Media Applications Using Sparse Light Fields

Immersive Video Technologies

Get a broad overview of the different modalities of immersive video technologies—from omnidirectional video to light fields and volumetric video—from a multimedia processing perspective. From capture to representation, coding, and display, video technologies have been evolving significantly and in many different directions over the last few decades, with the ultimate goal of providing a truly immersive experience to users. After setting up a common background for these technologies, based on the plenoptic function theoretical concept, Immersive Video Technologies offers a comprehensive overview of the leading technologies enabling visual immersion, including omnidirectional (360 degrees) video, light fields, and volumetric video. Following the critical components of the typical content production and delivery pipeline, the book presents acquisition, representation, coding, rendering, and quality assessment approaches for each immersive video modality. The text also reviews current standardization efforts and explores new research directions. With this book the reader will a) gain a broad understanding of immersive video technologies that use three different modalities: omnidirectional video, light fields, and volumetric video; b) learn about the most recent scientific results in the field, including the recent learning-based methodologies; and c) understand the challenges and perspectives for immersive video technologies. - Describes the whole content processing chain for the main immersive video modalities (omnidirectional video, light fields, and volumetric video) - Offers a common theoretical background for immersive video technologies based on the concept of plenoptic function - Presents some exemplary applications of immersive video technologies

Advanced Image Processing for Immersive Media Applications Using Sparse Light-fields

Light-field Image and Video Compression for Future Immersive Applications

Evolutions in video technologies tend to offer increasingly immersive experiences. However, currently available 3D technologies are still very limited and only provide uncomfortable and unnatural viewing situations to the users. The next generation of immersive video technologies appears therefore as a major technical challenge, particularly with the promising light-field (LF) approach. The light-field represents all the light rays (i.e. in all directions) in a scene. New devices for sampling/capturing the light-field of a scene are emerging fast such as camera arrays or plenoptic cameras based on lenticular arrays. Several kinds of display systems target immersive applications like Head Mounted Display and projection-based light-field display systems, and promising target applications already exist. For several years now this light-field representation has been drawing a lot of interest from many companies and institutions, for example in MPEG and JPEG groups. Light-field contents have specific structures, and use a massive amount of data, that represent a challenge to set up future services. One of the main goals of this work is first to assess which technologies and formats are realistic or promising. The study is done through the scope of image/video compression, as compression efficiency is a key factor for enabling these services on the consumer markets. Secondly, improvements and new coding schemes are proposed to increase compression performance in order to enable efficient light-field content transmission on future networks.