596 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 31 INTRODUCTION Today, the popularity of 3D media usage in computerized environment and the research on 3D content generation is increasing. 3D contents are frequently used in various applications such as computer games, movies and even in home environmental systems and this reputation leads visualization of 3D contents such as 3D videos and 3D images becoming more significant. For visualizing the 3D contents, thumbnail representa- tion is used in order to provide a quick overview of multimedia files in order to allow a quick scanning over a large number of data. By using the traditional methods, the thumbnail generally shows the first frame of the video and for im- ages, visual representation is generated by using shrinking, manual cropping or uniform scaling. However, these approaches do not preserve the important parts of the multimedia files and result- ing thumbnails do not give the general idea of the content. Furthermore, in spite of the existence of Yeliz Yigit Bilkent University, Turkey S. Fatih Isler Bilkent University, Turkey Tolga Capin Bilkent University, Turkey 3D Thumbnails for 3D Videos with Depth ABSTRACT In this chapter, we present a new thumbnail format for 3D videos with depth, 3D thumbnail, which helps users to understand the content by preserving the recognizable features and qualities of 3D videos. The current thumbnail solutions do not give the general idea of the content and are not illustrative. In spite of the existence of 3D media content databases, there is no thumbnail representation for 3D contents. Thus, we propose a framework that generates 3D thumbnails from layered depth video (LDV) and video plus depth (V+D) by using two different methodologies on importance maps: saliency-depth and layer based approaches. Finally, several experiments are presented that indicate 3D thumbnails are illustrative. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-326-3.ch031