Content Creation for Stereoscopic 3D and Beyond Stereoscopic 3D is established in cinema, on Blu-ray, TV, PCs, laptops, and mobile devices. Since nowadays technology for stereo 3D is mature and content creation is understood well enough, these developments are expected to be sustainable this time. Most current systems rely on classical approaches to 3D video, i.e. representation as stereo or multiview video, coding and transmission using simulcast, frame-compatible composition or MVC. More advanced “next generation” approaches exploit some kind of understanding of the 3D scene geometry such as depth or disparity, in order to extend functionality and increase efficiency. This includes for instance flexible adjustment of depth impression to viewing conditions and user preferences or support of autostereoscopic multiview displays. Also content creation for classical stereo 3D can greatly benefit from such 3D geometry aware processing. Naturally such advanced 3D video representation formats require advanced processing algorithms, e.g. to extract 3D geometry and to render virtual views. Such advanced 3D video representation and processing will be the focus of this talk.

Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Aljosa Smolic joined Disney Research Zurich, Switzerland in 2009, as Senior Research Scientist and Head of the “Advanced Video Technology” group. Before, he was Scientific Project Manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI), Berlin, also heading a research group. He has been involved in several national and international research projects, where he conducted research in various fields of video processing, video coding, computer vision and computer graphics, and published more than 100 referred scientific papers in these fields. In current projects he is responsible for research in 2D video, 3D video and free viewpoint video processing. Specifically stereoscopic 3D video and beyond is the main focus of his research group.

He received the Dipl.-Ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany in 1996, and the Dr.-Ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany, in 2001. Dr. Smolic received the “Rudolf-Urtlel-Award” of the German Society for Technology in TV and Cinema (FKTG) for his dissertation in 2002. He is Area Editor for Signal Processing: Image Communication and served as Guest Editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Transactions on CSVT, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and other scientific journals. He chaired the MPEG ad hoc group on 3DAV pioneering standards for 3D video coding. In this context he also served as one of the Editors of the Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) standard. Currently, he is Associate Lecturer at ETH Zurich, teaching Multimedia Communications, a course that he was also teaching for many years at TU Berlin. He also had Visiting Professor appointments at Technical Universities of Catalunya (UPC) and Madrid (UPM) as well as at the University de les Illes Balears, teaching full lecture courses on 3D video processing. Further, he gave full 2 day seminar courses on 3D video processing at the European Patent Office in Munich as well as in The Hague.