A shape-match based algorithm for pseudo-3D conversion of 2D videos

This paper presents a shape-match based method of converting conventional 2D videos to their pseudo-3D versions to achieve stereo effect via stereopsis. While conventional 2D videos do not contain true 3D information or difficult to extract such true 3D information, the proposed algorithm is to exploit the tolerance of the human visual perception to estimate pseudo-3D parameters for 3D conversion. The proposed algorithm has the features of: (i) the original 2D video frame is regarded as the reference frame for the pseudo-stereo image pair; (ii) appropriate disparity information is extracted by shape-based matching inside a small library of true stereo image pairs; and (iii) the extracted disparity is then used to construct a right video frame to complete the pseudo-stereo conversion. Our experiments show that a certain level of stereo effect has been achieved for our test video set and some samples of such experiments are illustrated for visual inspection.