Approaches to stereoscopic video based on spatiotemporal interpolation

The creation of stereoscopic imagery derived from a monoscopic source by splitting the signal into two channels with an inter-channel temporal delay has a long history extending back to military reconnaissance research during WWII and to the 1920's in film-based work. Recently, several academic and commercial efforts have emerged utilizing 2D-3D conversion as a new paradigm in single-lens stereoscopy. Several examples will be discussed below, including the TransVision system developed by the author which runs on conventional Pentium/PCI platforms. Alongside these commercial developments, continuing research in vision psychophysics is shedding new light on the fundamental neural processing mechanisms underlying these technologies. Such research has shown, for example, that spatio-temporally interpolated stereo is closely related to structure-from-motion and kinetic depth phenomena, does not rely on monocular form cues and can be demonstrated even in dynamic imagery composed entirely of random noise.