A method for automatic temporal and relative calibration of the amateur cameras to produce 3D videos

In this paper, a novel method has been proposed to automatically produce 3D videos through amateur digital cameras that have been fixed with each other. Asynchrony of the videos (frames per second rates and start times), unavailability of the exact camera internal parameters, and the technical limitation of precise relative adjusting the stereo cameras could be known as the main challenges of producing 3D videos via the amateur cameras. In the proposed method, the videos acquired by the stereo camera are synchronized through the automatic matching between temporal indices. Then, the calm periods of videos (the times with zero relative velocity between camera and scenes) are detected to be used for selecting proper matched image frames. Proper matched frames are then applied for finding matched points via a geometrical constrained feature-based matching method. The matched points are used for self-calibration as well as relative parameters estimation of the stereo cameras. In the last step, epipolar resampling procedure has been used to generate normalized videos. Automatic and precise synchronization of the stereo videos as well as the proper generalization of the proposed approach in the different sample datasets has been seen in the evaluation processes. Spectator satisfaction in the depth perception of the 3D videos is another quality achievement of the proposed method.