The representations of the 3D scenes are the bridging technology among the procedures of scene extraction, modeling, transmission, and viewing for a 3D TV framework. However, the requirements of scene representations in each procedure are often very different and even sometimes conflicting. To achieve these different requirements, different 3D scene representation techniques are available and generally categorized into three fundamental classes according to whether geometric models are used or not. The first category is rendering with explicit geometry which has direct 3D information. The second category uses no geometry information but only 2D images or videos to represent the 3D scene and is also called image-based or texture-based representations. The final category relies on positional correspondences across a small number of images to render new views. This chapter provides a short description of these important techniques and approaches which could be used for 3D scene representations.

Controlled Vocabulary Terms

rendering (computer graphics); three-dimensional television