3D Visual Communications

Organization of the book

This book is organized as three parts:

• principles of 3D visual systems: 3D graphics and rending, 3D display, and 3D content creation are all well covered
• visual communication: fundamental technologies used in 3D video coding and communication system, and the quality of experience. There are discussions on various 3D video coding formats and different communication systems, to evaluate the advantages of each system
• advances and applications of 3D visual communication

Chapter 1 overviews the whole end-to-end 3D video ecosystem, in which we cover key components in the pipeline: the 3D source coding, pre-processing, communication system, post-processing, and system-level design. We highlight the challenges and opportunities for 3D visual communication systems to give readers a big picture of the 3D visual content deployment technology, and point out which specific chapters relate to the listed advanced application scenarios.

3D scene representations are the bridging technology for the entire 3D visual pipeline from creation to visualization. Different 3D scene representations exhibit different characteristics and the selections should be chosen according to the requirement of the targeted applications. Various techniques can be categorized according to the amount of geometric information used in the 3D representation spectrum; at one extreme is the simplest form via rendering without referring to any geometry, and the other end uses geometrical description. ...