ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of 2D-to-3D conversion technology and its applications in 3D video communication. Generally, 2D-to-3D conversion techniques comprise of automatic and human interventional methods. Depth-from-defocus methods generate a depth map based on the amount of blurring present in the images. With the 2D-to-3D conversion technology, the depth map coding efficiency and error concealment ability can be improved, which is very important for the transmission of 3D content in wireless network. When there is less 3D content, 2D-to-3D conversion is very important for 3D content creation. With the development of 3D technology, there will be more and more 3D content. Motion estimation is extensively used in video coding to get the motion vectors between different macroblocks. Structure from motion is often employed to recover the camera parameters and 3D scene structure by identifying points in two or more images that are the projections of the same point in space.