Video with Depth

Lifewolf writes: "A new technology from 3DV Systems uses pulsed infrared illumination to capture depth information for every pixel of a video stream. This allows for neat tricks like realtime keying without need for color backgrounds. JVC is already selling a product based on this, the ZCAM."

Comments

Re:What's so difficult?

[Pemdas]

The concepts behind it aren't too difficult, a google search for epipolar geometry is a good place to start.

The biggest problems are computational; it's hard to do a good job of stereo reconstruction at high frame rates in real time. It's by no means impossible, and there are commercial out there that do it, like this one.

Two cameras aren't really necessary, either, if your camera is moving in the scene. It's possible to recover both the movement of a camera and 3-d information about a scene just by moving a camera through it. Googling for structure from motion is a good place to start looking into those techniques, and there's a pretty cool page about one groups application here.

In short, this company may have an interesting prodect (depending on cost and more details on the error characteristics) but this isn't something that couldn't be done with existing methods.

Also, as an aside, I find it interesting that they take a swipe at laser rangefinders as requiring a spinning mirror, when just about all IR cameras have a spinning "chopper" as an integral part of the exposure system...:)

This is huge for MPEG4

[William Tanksley]

I don't believe nobody has posted about MPEG4. This is very interesting for that -- film using this, and you can encode into MPEG4 format with /huge/ compression almost automatically. The hard part about MPEG4 is object detection; this makes that almost free.

-Billy