Towards 3-D scene reconstruction from broadcast video

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3-D) scene reconstruction from broadcast video is a challenging problem with many potential applications, such as 3-D TV, free-view TV, augmented reality or three-dimensionalization of two-dimensional (2-D) media archives. In this paper, a flexible and effective system capable of efficiently reconstructing 3-D scenes from broadcast video is proposed, with the assumption that there is relative motion between camera and scene/objects. The system requires no a priori information and input, other than the video sequence itself, and capable of estimating the internal and external camera parameters and performing a 3-D motion-based segmentation, as well as computing a dense depth field. The system also serves as a showcase to present some novel approaches for moving object segmentation, sparse and dense reconstruction problems. According to the simulations for both synthetic and real data, the system achieves a promising performance for typical TV content, indicating that it is a significant step towards the 3-D reconstruction of scenes from broadcast video. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.