Semantics and 3D media: Current issues and perspectives

3D digital content has become popular as emerging media that can be created, edited and shared by users in a collaborative environment, likewise images and videos. The popularity of 3D media is not confined to the leisure sphere but it increased in many fields ranging from the entertainment market to the industrial product modelling, to health, biology, art, virtual tourism, and more. While problems related to the representation of the geometry of 3D shapes have been largely solved by the CG community, tools for coding, extracting, sharing, and retrieving the semantic content of 3D media are still far from satisfactory: interdisciplinary research efforts are needed to foster the development of the 3D Internet and its applications. The purpose of this paper is thus motivating research in this direction, presenting our vision of the future and, without offering any off-the-shelf solution, giving an overview of the various aspects of semantics required to optimise tasks and processes related to 3D content in different application domains. We identified four grand challenges which synthesise the open issues in common to the considered fields and represent a roadmap towards semantic 3D media. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.