A 3D online monitoring system

A newly developed 3D online monitoring system provides image quality equivalent to DVD and features a new image capture method that relatively reduces the visual burden compared with conventional stereo camera systems. The remote stereo vision system (RSVS) developed by the authors synthesizes right and left images taken by the stereo cameras into single image information and is compressed using the MPEG2 standard to reduce the bandwidth needed for transferring to remote observers via the Internet. The image quality is approximately 13 Mbps. With conventional image capture methods using stereo cameras arranged in parallel, parallax increases as the object gets closer to the cameras, which in turn creates eye strain for the observer. The optical axes of the right and left cameras intersect and the position of the intersection is adjusted when capturing an image to decrease the visual burden compared to conventional cross methods which generate geometrical distortion in the depth because the locus of the same parallax is circular (horopter). The new stereo camera image capture method developed by the authors is capable of correcting geometric distortion to reduce the visual burden and solve this problem.