Section: Software

M3DPlayer: 3D video player

Participant : Laurent Guillo [contact person] .

A 3D player - named M3DPlayer - supporting rendering of a 3D scene and navigation within the scene has been developed. It integrates as a plug-in the 3D model-based video codec of the team. From a video sequence of a static scene viewed by a monocular moving camera, the 3D model-based video codec allows the automatic construction of a representation of a video sequence as a stream of textured 3d models. 3d models are extracted using stereovision and dense matching maps estimation techniques. A virtual sequence is reconstructed by projecting the textured 3d models on image planes. This representation enables 3d functionalities such as synthetic objects insertion, lightning modification, stereoscopic visualization or interactive navigation. The codec allows compression at very low bit-rates (16 to 256 kb/s in 25Hz CIF format) with a satisfactory visual quality. It also supports scalable coding of both geometry and texture information. The first version of the software was registered at the Agency for the Protection of Programmes (APP) under the number IDDN.FR.001.130017.000S.P.2003.000.41200.

A second version of the player has been registered at the APP (Agence de Protection des Programmes) under the number IDDN.FR.001.090023.000.S.P.2008.000.21000. In 2009-2010, we focused on improving the rendering engine, based on recent OpenGL extensions, to be able to render the viewed scenes on an auto-stereoscopic display with low-end graphic cards. In our case, auto-stereoscopic display requires the rendering of eight $1920x1200$ frames instead of just one for a standard display. This player is also used to render LDI (Layered Depth Images) and LDV (Layered Depth Videos) and to visualize 3D scenes on autostereoscopic displays taking multiple input views rendered from the LDI representation.