Getting Machines to Watch 3D for You

The advantages of automatic monitoring of multiple television channels are well known. There are just not enough eyeballs for human operators to see what is going on. With the advent of stereoscopic 3D in mainstream television production and distribution, the benefits of automatic monitoring are even greater, as 3D viewing is even less conducive to manual monitoring.

This paper, presented at IBC 2011, gives a comprehensive introduction to a wide range of automatic monitoring possibilities for 3D video. There are significant algorithmic challenges involved in some of these tasks, often involving careful high-level analysis of picture content. Further challenges arise from the need for monitoring to be robust to typical processing undergone by video signals in a broadcast chain.

By Mike Knee, Consultant Engineer, R&D Algorithms Team, Snell