Subtitling Stereographic Imagery

Abstract

There is disclosed a method and apparatus for subtitling stereoscopic imagery. The stereoscopic imagery consists of one or more stereo pairs of imagery which are stored on film, other physical means such as paper, or digitally and which when viewed or projected with appropriate systems, give the illusion of three-dimensional depth. By imprinting subtitle data onto a single eye view image of each stereo pair, the textual or graphical data may be seen by the viewer without fear of discomfort from misalignment of stereographic subtitling and without a loss of depth illusion from lost or improper visual depth cues caused by stereographic subtitle placement. The subtitle data may be physically imprinted onto a physical medium containing the image pairs or may be composited onto the single eye view image digital files. The subtitling may be created as an image or images separate from the stereo pair imagery with the intent that these monoscopic subtitles will be viewed or projected over the corresponding single eye view image or images at the time of viewing. The terms subtitling, titling and metadata display are considered to be equivalent and interchangeable and are taken to mean the addition of visual text, graphic characters or elements to imagery, in order to provide explanatory or additional information such as language translation, action cues, camera data, or scene information to the viewer of the imagery and which visual text, graphic characters or elements do not exist in the captured imagery nor in any computer generated portions of the imagery that comprise an elemental component of the photographic or cinematographic art of that imagery, regardless of the information content or end use of the visual text, graphic characters or elements.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.