Search

Accurate correction of atmospheric effects on data captured by an infrared (IR) camera is crucial for several applications such as vegetation monitoring, temperature monitoring, satellite images, hyperspectral imaging, numerical model simulations, surface properties characterization, and IR measurement interpretation. Atmospheric effects depend on the temporal changes, i. e., year, season, day, hour, etc., and on the geometry between the camera and the measured scene, i. e., line of sight. The orientation and the optical depth of the camera significantly affect the variation of the geometry across the pixels. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the range and zenith angle of each pixel using only the Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of the camera and a point of interest in the scene. The estimated geometry and measured meteorological data are used to obtain the spectral atmospheric transmittance and path radiance. Furthermore, we propose an atmospheric effects removal, i. e., atmospheric correction, method that considers the spectral characteristics of the detector, lens, and filter. The proposed atmospheric correction process is analyzed in detail with the simultaneous measurements of two IR cameras. In this process, an enhanced temperature calibration method is developed and it is shown that the temperature accuracy for the dynamic range of the IR camera is very close to the noise equivalent temperature difference (NETD) value of the camera.

Research efforts on 3DTV technology have been strengthened worldwide recently, covering the whole media processing chain from capture to display. Different 3DTV systems rely on different 3D scene representations that integrate various types of data. Efficient coding of these data is crucial for the success of 3DTV. Compression of pixel-type data including stereo video, multiview video, and associated depth or disparity maps extends available principles of classical video coding. Powerful algorithms and open international standards for multiview video coding and coding of video plus depth data are available and under development, which will provide the basis for introduction of various 3DTV systems and services in the near future. Compression of 3D mesh models has also reached a high level of maturity. For static geometry, a variety of powerful algorithms are available to efficiently compress vertices and connectivity. Compression of dynamic 3D geometry is currently a more active field of research. Temporal prediction is an important mechanism to remove redundancy from animated 3D mesh sequences. Error resilience is important for transmission of data over error prone channels, and multiple description coding (MDC) is a suitable way to protect data. MDC of still images and 2D video has already been widely studied, whereas multiview video and 3D meshes have been addressed only recently. Intellectual property protection of 3D data by watermarking is a pioneering research area as well. The 3D watermarking methods in the literature are classified into three groups, considering the dimensions of the main components of scene representations and the resulting components after applying the algorithm. In general, 3DTV coding technology is maturating. Systems and services may enter the market in the near future. However, the research area is relatively young compared to coding of other types of media. Therefore, there is still a lot of room for improvement and new development of algorithms.

We present a survey of transport methods for 3-D video ranging from early analog 3DTV systems to most recent digital technologies that show promise in designing 3DTV systems of tomorrow. Potential digital transport architectures for 3DTV include the DVB architecture for broadcast and the Internet Protocol (IP) architecture for wired or wireless streaming. There are different multiview representation/compression methods for delivering the 3-D experience, which provide a tradeoff between compression efficiency, random access to views, and ease of rate adaptation, including the "video-plus-depth" compressed representation and various multiview video coding (MVC) options. Commercial activities using these representations in broadcast and IP streaming have emerged, and successful transport of such data has been reported. Motivated by the growing impact of the Internet protocol based media transport technologies, we focus on the ubiquitous Internet as the network infrastructure of choice for future 3DTV systems. Current research issues in unicast and multicast mode multiview video streaming include network protocols such as DCCP and peer-to-peer protocols, effective congestion control, packet loss protection and concealment, video rate adaptation, and network/service scalability. Examples of end-to-end systems for multiview video streaming have been provided.