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Video with Depth

Posted by michael on from the 3d-glasses dept.

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."

2 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Fun to abuse... by fleeb_fantastique · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can you imagine using this technology to insert your favorite politician in a porn video? George Bush Does Dallas.

    Used within a survellance camera, it could detect motion without getting tricked by that tree near the air vent.

    It could also be used in surgical situations where a specialist located in another state can more easily study facets of the video being provided to him (cutting out noise, if you will).

    You could do some really weird video editing where you could create a scene of a person standing in a verdant field in the middle of summer with snow falling within his 'mask'.

    Items recorded in this way (presuming the mask is also recorded) could perhaps be admissable evidence that helps the court focus on a specific action that might otherwise get missed.

    It might also provide a less-expensive way to make 3-D videos. Precursor to holographic movies?

    --
    And so it goes.
    1. Re:Fun to abuse... by andycat · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It might also provide a less-expensive way to make 3-D videos. Precursor to holographic movies?

      It's a step along the way, but it's got one major drawback: it only captures a scene from one viewpoint. As soon as you move away from that viewpoint you're going to see holes in the scene where the camera didn't capture any information. To fix this, you must either (a) keep the viewpoint fixed at the camera's center of projection or (b) capture multiple views of the environment to fill in the missing bits.

      Cameras like this have another potential benefit: better video compression. There's a section of the MPEG-4 standard that provides for segmenting your scene into objects so you could, say, encode the weatherman separately from the backdrop he's waving his hands at. If you shoot with a camera like this that can give you a rough silhouette of major objects in the scene, you could spend more of your time doing high-quality encoding of the people running around in the foreground and less of your time on the background that doesn't change for the length of the shot.

      That said, I'm awfully skeptical about their claims of precision. As another poster has mentioned, there's a reason why laser range scanners cost so much: building an accurate rangefinder with lots of dynamic range is hard. As for object segmentation... I personally don't believe the image they provide as an example. Take a look at the depth map of the people at the conference table. In particular, look at the tabletop. It's nearly parallel to the camera axis, which means that its depth should be increasing fairly rapidly, which means you should see a gradient from light (near) to dark (far) in that part of the image -- but no, it's all one color.

      I suppose you can explain that as treating everything between depths D1 and D2 as a single object, but that doesn't work all that well in practice. What's far more likely in my opinion is that that object mask is a hand-created example rather than the actual output of the device.