SUMMARY PhD. THESIS

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General Subject of the Thesis
In the last decade, visual representations (images or video sequences) have been present in almost all
aspects of everyday life, making multimedia information ubiquitous. Services and products like digital
photography, digital television, DVDs and BlueRays, the World Wide Web, videoconferencing, virtual
collaboration and others, are all based to a great extent on the use of such visual content.
Currently, one can witness, under the momentum of the theoretical and technological developments
characteristic to the „digital era”, a wide process of „re-invention” of the video systems and services
formerly based on the use of analogue technology. Likewise, the capabilities available in video
rendering devices (screens that allow high contrast ratios, low power consumption and various shapes,
sizes and spatial resolutions), the high throughput processing and transmitting networks (in the order of
Mbytes per second) and the opportunities offered by the visual information acquisition systems that
allow high quality images and videos (high resolution, colour depth and time sampling of more than
160 frames per second) and the „boom” in applications and use case scenarios have all contributed in
the last decade to an unprecedented growth and development of systems that make use of static (images
and photos) and dynamic (videos and animations) visual information. In order to cope with these
overwhelming requests of new product „invention” and technological breakthrough that will surpass the
performances of current devices, services and technologies, one can observe a certain segmentation and
specialisation adapted to different types of applications and user groups, as well as an import and
mixture of techniques, methods, and technologies stemming from various fields (statistics, chemistry,
physics, biology) that were summoned to help. However, one of the most important/revolutionary
aspects of the past few years is the interest in adding the extra depth dimension to the „classic”
brightness information that is captured from the scene.
This thesis aims at bringing personal and original contributions to the challenges that are being currently
pursued worldwide within the general field of 2D & 3D vision systems. The research, according to the
structure of the presented work, focused on the following:
a. Acquiring indepth knowledge in the field of 2D & 3D vision systems engineering: from photo to
the latest innovations in imaging acquisition, processing, transport and rendering, including 3D.
b. Studying, analysing and comparing emerging methods and paradigms for the coding and
compression of the video signal – namely distributed video coding, all in the framework of the
increasing number of mobile video-aware devices and wireless transmissions.
c. Implementing and proposing new algorithms for acquiring/generating/extracting depth
information from defocus and light polarisation, together with brightness information in order to
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