Casual Stereoscopic Photo Authoring

Stereoscopic 3D displays become more and more popular these years. However, authoring high-quality stereoscopic 3D content remains challenging. In this paper, we present a method for easy stereoscopic photo authoring with a regular (monocular) camera. Our method takes two images or video frames using a monocular camera as input and transforms them into a stereoscopic image pair that provides a pleasant viewing experience. The key technique of our method is a perceptual-plausible image rectification algorithm that warps the input image pairs to meet the stereoscopic geometric constraint while avoiding noticeable visual distortion. Our method uses spatially-varying mesh-based image warps. Our warping method encodes a variety of constraints to best meet the stereoscopic geometric constraint and minimize visual distortion. Since each energy term is quadratic, our method eventually formulates the warping problem as a quadratic energy minimization which is solved efficiently using a sparse linear solver. Our method also allows both local and global adjustments of the disparities, an important property for adapting resulting stereoscopic images to different viewing conditions. Our experiments demonstrate that our spatially-varying warping technique can better support casual stereoscopic photo authoring than existing methods and our results and user study show that our method can effectively use casually-taken photos to create high-quality stereoscopic photos that deliver a pleasant 3D viewing experience.