Stereo Video Retargeting: Bringing the Theater Experience into Our Home

The popularity of stereo images/videos and various VR/AR display devices poses the need of resizing stereo image/video pairs. Nevertheless, traditional resizing methods like uniform scaling and cropping usually lead to annoying shape and depth distortions such as depth change and window violation. Although contentaward retargeting schemers can address such problems, existing content-aware methods often incur conflicts among the requirements on shape, depth, and temporal coherency preservation, thereby failing to meet one or more of these requirements. This can significantly degrade the quality of experience when watching at 3D movie at home. In this seminar, we will introduce our recent results on how to simultaneously avoid shape and depth distortions as well as maintain the temporal coherency of shape and depth while resizing a stereo image/video to a desired size. Different from the existing methods, our method effectively avoids the conflicts among depth, shape and temporal-coherency requirements by relaxing the resizing constraints on those regions in a 3D scene that cannot be perceived by human eyes to maintain the temporal coherency of the remaining regions. Based on this new finding, our method employs depth information to derive effective temporal-coherency constraints so as to offer visually pleasing results and achieves significantly better retargeting performance than existing methods, making it possible to bring the theater experience into our home.