Video memory compression for multi-view auto-stereoscopic displays

摘要

Nowadays, virtual 3D imaging is very commonly used in various domains, i.e. medical imaging or virtual reality. So far these 3D objects are projected to be displayed on 2D visualization systems (i.e. computer monitor or printed paper sheet), by the application itself, a graphic library or a specific hardware. Now, new displaying systems that allow computers to display 3D objects in real 3D appear, often based on the stereo-vision principle, which ultimate evolution is the multi-view auto-stereoscopic system, that displays different images at the same time, visible from different positions by different observers. When the number of images grows and these different images are directly stored, the needed memory becomes very large. This article proposes an algorithm for coding multi-view stereograms with very low quality loss and very fast and simple decoding that allows to calculate all the stereoscopic images with a low need of memory. This algorithm projects the objects on the screen but stores the associated depth of each one. Some of the background voxels are not erased by foreground voxels even if they are projected at the same point of the screen. All those voxels are sorted in a way that fasten the decoding which is reduced only to few memory copies.