Video 2-D-to-3-D conversion based on hybrid depth cueing

With the maturation of three-dimensional (3-D) technologies, display systems can provide higher visual quality to enrich the viewer experience. However, the depth information required for 3-D displays is not available in conventional 2-D recorded contents. Therefore, the conversion of existing 2-D video to 3-D video becomes an important issue for emerging 3-D applications. This paper presents a system which automatically converts 2-D videos to 3-D format. The proposed system combines three major depth cues: the depth from motion, the scene depth from geometrical perspective, and the fine-granularity depth from the relative position. The proposed system uses a block-based method incorporating a joint bilateral filter to efficiently generate visually comfortable depth maps and to diminish the blocky artifacts. By means of the generated depth map, 2-D videos can be readily converted into 3-D format. Moreover, for conventional 2-D displays, a 2-D image/video depth perception enhancement application is also presented. With the depth-aware adjustment of color saturation, contrast, and edge, the stereo effect of the 2-D content can be enhanced. A user study on subjective quality shows that the proposed method has promising results on depth quality and visual comfort.