Multi-view 3D video acquisition using hybrid cameras with beam splitter

We present a multi-view 3D video acquisition and its processing system for multi-view 3D television (3DTV). The proposed hybrid camera system consists of three-color cameras and one time of flight (TOF) camera. Since currently available TOF cameras do not provide color images associated with the depth image, we use a beam splitter between the color camera of the center view and the TOF camera to minimize the FOV difference between two cameras. We capture three-view color and one-view depth videos with hardware trigger synchronization. After capturing videos, we perform camera calibration, color correction, lens distortion correction, rectification, depth calibration, and multiview depth generation for three-view color videos. We showed experimental results using the proposed acquisition system. The proposed system can be used to generate multi-view 3D videos for 3DTV.