Light field video for immersive content production

Abstract

Light field video for content production is gaining both research and commercial interest as it has the potential to push the level of immersion for augmented and virtual reality to a close-to-reality experience. Light fields densely sample the viewing space of an object or scene using hundreds or even thousands of images with small displacements in between. However, a lack of standardised formats for compression, storage and transmission, along with the lack of tools to enable editing of light field data currently make it impractical for use in real-world content production. In this chapter we address two fundamental problems with light field data, namely representation and compression. Firstly we propose a method to obtain a 4D temporally coherent representation from the input light field video. This is an essential problem to solve that will enable efficient compression editing. Secondly, we present a method for compression of light field data based on the eigen texture method that provides a compact representation and enables efficient view-dependent rendering at interactive frame rates. These approaches achieve an order of magnitude compression and temporally consistent representation that are important steps towards practical toolsets for light field video content production.