Stereoscopic video synthesis from a monocular video

This paper presents an automatic and robust approach to synthesize stereoscopic videos from ordinary monocular videos acquired by commodity video cameras. Instead of recovering the depth map, the proposed method synthesizes the binocular parallax in stereoscopic video directly from the motion parallax in monocular video. The synthesis is formulated as an optimization problem via introducing a cost function of the stereoscopic effects, the similarity, and the smoothness constraints. The optimization selects the most suitable frames in the input video for generating the stereoscopic video frames. With the optimized selection, convincing and smooth stereoscopic video can be synthesized even by simple constant-depth warping. No user interaction is required. We demonstrate the visually plausible results obtained given the input clips acquired by ordinary handheld video camera.