A unified trifocal system for advanced depth-based 3D capture

While benefits of depth-maps for 3D post-production and content creation for multi-view displays are already widely known their usage as an alternative S3D production workflow is just starting to become visible. In addition the generation of reliable depth-maps is still an active research topic. The paper describes a comprehensive infrastructure approach comprising a trifocal camera system entirely based on Ethernet interface technology, a dedicated field recording solution realized with solid state technology capable of recording up to seven uncompressed 'high frame rate' camera streams in parallel, and algorithms for trifocal depth estimation enabling real-time depth preview on-set as well as high-quality depth extraction offline. The new interface approach harmonizes and consolidates image data, depth information and general metadata. The system provides a new 3D production workflow with no need of scene dependent adjustments but the possibility to calculate a virtual view with any favored baseline during post.