Objective
The aim of the Action is to undertake and to co-ordinate R&D activity in developing methods, standards and technologies to be used for pick-up and display devices and for coding and transmission of stereoscopic (3-D TV) signals.
The objectives mainly are :
Human factors research related to 3-D TV
psychophysical research
methods and tests materials for subjective evaluation
determination of a 3-D TV production grammar
specific subjective benefits of advanced TV systems
3D Systems
stereoscopic (glasses needed)
autostereoscopic (without glasses)
holographic (without glasses)
System components
image pick-up
mixing and editing
recording
stereoscopic and multiviewpoint displays
Coding, picture processing and transmission
source coding techniques
interpolation of intermediate views
computer generated holograms
Comparison and interaction between 3-D TV and HDTV
Main Results
As confirmed over the recent MC meetings, the members of COST 230 are satisfied with the Action, providing useful and effective contacts and exchange of ideas and experiences. Exchange of hard and software, as e.g. the offer of 3-D test sequences by the CCETT (F), were highly appreciated by the participants. A further acknowledgement is the current interest of new partners. The MC welcomed Spain as the 8th Signatory and approved the participation of the Sharp Laboratories of Europe (UK) as a very important partner in display technology as well as the participation of the University of Dresden (D).
Very welcome and useful contacts have been kept with ITU, WP 11A "Conventional, Enhanced and HDTV Systems". The ITU is very interested in 3-D ; the former COST 230 Chairman, Dr. Sand, has acted as a "Special Rapporteur" together with an expert from Japan.
It is worth mentioning that some contributions were delivered on invitation to the "Asia Display 95 Conference/International Display Workshops", 16/19 Oct 1995, in Hamamatsu (J).
Special interest was attracted at the COST Interaction Conference, Basel (CH), 9/11 Oct 1995, by an impressive demonstration staged by the Deutsche Telekom (G), based on their "SICONET" (Stereoscopic Image Communication Network") 3-D transmission system : a technical description of the working system has been included in an earlier section on Deutsche Telekom.
So much significant experience encouraged the MC to propose an extension (at least one year) to the COST TCT and CSO. The latter agreed on a two-year extension for COST 230 Action during the meeting of 11/12 Apr 1995. As a consequence, the termination of the Project activities is now scheduled for 25 Apr 1998.
Current status
According to the MoU, the Action is organised into three separate Working Groups :
WG I : Psycho-optics Chairman : Dr S. Pastoor (D)
WG II : Technology Chairman : Mr A.A. Dumbreck (UK)
WG III : Signal Processing Chairman : Dr B. Choquet (F)
Method of working
The method of working is to exchange information, ideas and experiences from the very different work of the participating institutions, by attending international symposia and workshops as well as from laboratory visits. Hardware devices and test materials for laboratory use and for demonstrations have been and will be exchanged. International workshops have been held and will be continued to support the communication between members, but also with interested persons outside the Project.
Participating administrations, institutes, universities and industries
British Telecom (BT) (UK)
BYB Group (D)
CCETT (F)
Faculdade de Engenharia do Porto (P)
FTZ Deutsche Telekom (D)
Fondazione Ugo Bordoni (FUB) (I)
Institut für Rundfunktechnik (IRT) (D)
IRISA/INRIA (F)
Realvision, S.A. (E)
Rijksuniversiteit Gent (B)
Sharp Laboratories Europe (SLE) (UK)
Siemens AG (D)
Société Soder (F)
Technische Universität Dresden, Informatik (D)
Technische Universität München, Augenklinik (D)
%Technische Universität München, Nachrichtentechnik (D)
University of Cagliari (I)
University of Genoa (I)
University of Porto (P)
University of Tessaloniki (GR)
UKAEA Technology (UK)
Universidad Politecnica de Madrid - DISAM (E)
Interested : De Monfort University, Leicester (UK)
Observers
Barco/EMT (B/D)
European Broadcasting Union (EBU) (CH)
Activities Philips Research Labs (NL)
The activities in the period 1995/96 have been at a lower level than expected, owing to severe budget restrictions as well as structural changes involving most participating organisations. The available budget and manpower had to be concentrated onto funded projects with a higher priority. The former Chair, Dr. Rüdiger Sand (IRT- D), made a valiant effort to keep the Project alive by being willing to undertake responsibility for the Action's co-ordination within such constraints. Thanks to his efforts, COST 230 members were able to co-operate with the RACE II-DISTIMA Project to organise the "International Workshop on Stereoscopic and Three-Dimensional Imaging", successfully held on 6/8 September 1995 in Santorini (GR).
Below some relevant technical contributions are reported from various institutions:
Institut für Rundfunktechnik (IRT)
Since the end of 1994, the Institut für Rundfunktechnik (IRT) has withdrawn from research and development in the field of stereoscopic television and therefore from the work of COST 230.
In 1995, stemming from an earlier doctoral thesis, a paper by Andreas Kayser: "Eine Analyse der Wahrnehmung von 3D-TV-Codierfehlern (An analysis of the reception of 3D-TV coding errors)" was published in the scientific journal of the IRT: Rundfunktechnische Mitteilungen Vol. 39, June 1995, pp. 45-50.
In 1995 and 1996, the IRT continued to allow Dr. Sand to act as Chairman of COST 230 until the election of Mr. Chiari as new Chair on 25 Sep 1996.
In addition, during 1995 and 1996, the IRT provided the COST 230 External Secretariat and in 1996 additionally was a COST 230 Grant Holder.
AEA Technology
AEA Technology continued to develop its 3-D product range with a new version of its time sequential 17 inch CRT-based 3-D display. This adds to the existing twin monitor display, and the range of 3-D endoscopes and industrial TV cameras. The top of the range camera has purpose built zoom lenses, designed to minimise problems often associated with matching pairs of conventional zoom lenses for 3-D. 3-D research has continued to be an important theme for AEA Technology. Their 3-D endoscope has continued in use, at a leading UK research hospital, for general surgery applications.
Furthermore, in co-operation with the ACTS Mirage project, AEA Technology has worked with Televirtual Ltd and the Independent Television Commission to produce a new demonstration two channel 3-D television programme, "Eye to Eye". This is a magazine style programme combining studio shot sequences with location shots of and from a rally car, and archive 3-D from twin reel 35 mm film. Studio shots were made using the DISTIMA 3-D camera designed and built within the eponymous European Union project by AEA Technology and Thomson Multimedia. Location shots used a versatile camera designed and built within Mirage. "Eye to Eye" demonstrates that, with care, current technology can be used to produce excellent quality 3-D TV programmes. It has been well received at a number of demonstrations to industry, and has been displayed in a range of formats including polarised light twin projectors.
Deutsche Telekom
The activities of Deutsche Telekom in the reporting period focused on the development of an analysis/synthesis 3D modelling approach for teleconference services and on the development of a market-ready stereoscopic video transmission service which was named "SICONET" (Stereoscopic Image Communication Network).
3-D Analysis/Synthesis for teleconference applications
The 3D analysis/synthesis approach has been further developed to allow the 360 modelling of a speaker in a teleconference or videotelephony application. Five stereo camera views provide 3-D information from which the 3-D model is computed.
Overview of the SICONET project
The SICONET service, in its first phase, allows the realisation of a transparent bidirectional two-channel stereo transmission via a satellite link at approximately 2x14 Mbit/s for each direction (ETSI coding scheme), including 4 audio channels (of bandwidth 15 kHz) and an additional 2.048 Mbit/s data channel. At the moment the transmission is performed using the Deutsche Telekom satellite DFS "Kopernikus" (20/30GHz range with QPSK-modulation).
An ATM adaptation and the use of MPEG2 codecs for the realisation of lower bitrates is in preparation and will be introduced soon. The SICONET project has been demonstrated on the COST forum 1995 in Basel (CH).
One of the first realised pilot connection links two hospitals in Germany with each other, allowing the remote consultation of specialists for the evaluation of stereoscopic video obtained via an endoscope. Future applications of this new service will be teleroboting and teleteaching/telelearning.
Sharp Laboratories of Europe
The 3-D research activities at Sharp Laboratories of Europe can be summarised as follows:
Development of an autostereoscopic technology using Sharp LCD technology.
Investigation of image quality and human interface issues.
Development of computer system based on SGI ONYX for multi-view image generation to drive the display.
Development of head tracking technology for observers of multi-view 3-D display.
Fondazione Ugo Bordoni
In 1995 research activity at FUB has concentrated on the following items:
Development of a fully digital chip-set for the switched distribution of stereoscopic video signals arranged in 4:2:2 format pairs, for a use within video production plants or research and development laboratories. The design has been implemented on a programmable gate-array target, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of such a technology for the support of real-time full bandwidth video signals. The chip set is actually in use on a modular breadboard-based 3-D TV video distribution system at the FUB video laboratory.
A stereoscopic image analysis approach has been defined to code the image blocks according to their visual relevance, in terms of their relative distances from the shooting system focus plane. According to such a visual criterion, a coding algorithm has been outlined which is suitable for both stereoscopic and monoscopic (compatible) images, as well as for the generation of a priority code to be associated with image blocks for transmission over digital switching networks.
In addition, in 1995 the FUB has taken the role of Vice-Chair.
In 1996 research activity at FUB has concentrated on the following items:
In co-operation with the Department of Information Systems (DIS) of Rome University, "La Sapienza", research has been started on an embedded computing system for stereoscopic image processing that in case of fault occurrence degrades its performance to a quality level still acceptable for television applications. In particular this system is designed to support a pyramidal Quad-Tree motion/disparity estimation algorithm for stereoscopic image processing, in an extended form of the basic version proposed in the literature to take into account the presence of faults. Typical industry applications range from robot vision image processing to real-time video codecs, where a prediction of image areas displacements is performed between two images adjacent in time (motion vectors) or/and in space (disparity vectors), to minimise the transmission bit-rate over telecommunications networks for a given image quality level.
The development has begun of a driver for time-sequential stereoscopic displays to recover the full vertical resolution of stereo images; preliminary results have shown that it will be possible to achieve the target by changing the raster scan format of the signal in a specific mode involving the vertical synchronism pulses only.
Some engineering degree thesis works in co-operation with the DIS have been co-ordinated regarding the following items:
a feedback control mechanism of the bit-rate produced by a 3-D TV coder developed in software at FUB;
the implementation of a quad-tree algorithm for the disparity evaluation of stereoscopic image pairs;
the definition of a microprogrammed architecture for the real-time conversion of the raster scan format of stereoscopic video signals from simultaneous to sequential mode;
the definition of a microprogrammed architecture for the real-time recording and retrieval of stereoscopic video sequences on cost-effective memory supports;
the definition of a microprogrammed architecture for the real-time recording and retrieval of stereoscopic video sequences on RAID disk arrays.
In addition, in late September 1996 the FUB representative has taken the role of Chairman. Since then, FUB has been acting as COST 230 External Secretariat and also as COST 230 Grant Holder.
Work planned
The MC hopes that the difficulties to which repeated reference has had to be made may be overcome. Generally speaking, the current work and the methods of co-operation satisfying the intent of the MoU of the Action, will continue.
The Action will use its efforts to support the next COST Ministerial Conference, to be held in Prague, May 1997.
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