Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Japan

Biography: Toshiaki Fujii received his B.E., M.E., and Dr.E. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1990, 1992, and 1995, respectively. His current research interests include multi-dimensional signal processing, multi-camera systems, multi-view video coding and transmission, free-viewpoint television, and their applications. From 1995, he has been with the Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University. From 2008 to 2010, he was with the Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is currently a Professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University. Prof. Fujii is a member of IEEE Signal Processing Society, Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, Information Processing Society of Japan, and Institute of Image Information and Television Engineers.

Speech Title: 3D Visual Communications

Abstract: This paper describes trends and future perspectives of 3D visual communications. Until now, there have been proposed various types of 3D-related technologies. One trend is a development of many kinds of 3D displays, such as Integral Photography, Parallax Barrier, etc. Another trend is Free-Viewpoint Video system where users can move their viewpoints freely on a conventional 2D display. As for the input systems, on the other hand, there have also been proposed various types of 3D input devices. The examples are large-scale multi-viewpoint cameras with tens or hundreds of cameras, active range sensors which use infrared light or lasers to measure a distance to an object, Light Field Camera which is a special camera to capture a light field of a scene. Those technologies in both input and output of a 3D scene have been developed independently and a total system from input to output has not fully investigated so far. In this paper, we focus on a 3D visual communications system, which is a full-chain system from capturing to display of a 3D scene. In this system, various types of input data are converted into the common data format, and at the receiver side, it is expanded to various types of 3D display systems. The representation is roughly categorized into two: (1) to use 3D models of the scene, and (2) to use Ray-Space representation. We introduce some of the systems we developed in our laboratory based on the above representations and describe future perspectives of 3D visual communications.

Keywords: 3D image, visual communication, 3D display, 3D camera, ray-space