UBC Digital Multimedia Lab's Blog

3D movie timeline

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:31:00 +0000

Celebrate Research Week Postdoctoral Showcase

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 23:53:00 +0000

I will be the first speaker at the University of British Columbia's Celebrate Research Week Postdoctoral Showcase.

I will be talking about 3D video. This talk is free and it is intended for a general audience.

More info follows:

Talk: Guidelines for Capturing High-Quality 3D Videos
Date: March 8th, 2011
Time: 10 AM
Location: St. John’s College Social Lounge – 2111 Lower Mall (see map)

Hope to see you there!

We have a new website!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:20:00 +0000

The Digital Multimedia Lab has a new website!

Di Xu was in charge of setting it up and she did a great job. Just take a look.

Editing 3D video

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:01:00 +0000

If you want to learn the basics of shooting 3D video you can watch the first 15 minutes of this video from Adobe.

I was happy to find out that professionals are using the same equipment that we have in our lab.

3D tests

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 01:08:00 +0000

Having fun with stereoscopic (3D) video. This anaglyph image is taken from two synchronized video frames (left view + right view). The distance between the two cameras is 77 mm. I am 3 meters away from the cameras and the distance between the cameras and the background is 5 meters. The original video frames have been modified so that nothing pops out of the screen (i.e., everything seems to be inside your monitor). This provides 3D image with higher quality according to the results from subjective tests that we performed. Click the image to enlarge it.

Girl swinging 3D

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:22:00 +0000

I took this 3D video with the Fuji 3D camera. You can watch it with anaglyph glasses (but it only works on the YouTube page).

Floating in the Digital Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:53:00 +0000

New York Time's film movie critic Manohla Dargis talks about the origins of cinema, digital technology and James Cameron's Avatar.

I haven't seen Avatar yet but, based on some comments from some of you guys, it's a cool movie, right?

SSIM

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:48:00 +0000

SSIM stands for Structural SIMilarity index (it was originally known as University Quality Index, UQI). SSIM is an algorithm proposed by LIVE. It is a quality metric for images and it was developed from intuitive ideas regarding how distortions in image structure might be measured.

There are several papers that describe SSIM (and the improved versions of this metric). However, I like one of the earlier papers because it is a very straightforward description of this technique:

A universal image quality index
Zhou Wang; Bovik, A.C.;
Signal Processing Letters, IEEE
Volume 9, Issue 3, March 2002 Page(s):81 - 84

I think this is a very good starting point for anyone interested in image and video quality assessment (QA). I also found a Keynote Address paper by Bovik's group. It provides a good overview of QA.

Although these papers might provide a good introduction to QA, there is still the challenge of creating efficient quality metrics that allow us to compare HDR versus LDR content. The following paper deals with this problem:

Aydin, T. O., Mantiuk, R., Myszkowski, K., and Seidel, H. 2008. Dynamic range independent image quality assessment. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 Papers (Los Angeles, California, August 11 - 15, 2008). SIGGRAPH '08. ACM, New York, NY, 1-10.

The website about H.265

noreply@blogger.com (Qiang) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:34:00 +0000

http://www.h265.net/

This website (blog based as well) continues putting updated information about VCEG/MPEG meetings, with the emphasis on the progress of the development of H.265. H.265 is tentatively named as High-performance Video Coding (HVC). The formal name however is still under discussion.

BTW, I really like how this website summarizes the tags or labels (referring to the 'Tag Cloud' in their website). I wish we could do something similar.