A realtime hardware system for stereoscopic videoconferencing with viewpoint adaptation1

摘要

This paper describes a hardware system and the underlying algorithms that were developed for realtime stereoscopic videoconferencing with viewpoint adaptation within the European PANORAMA project. The goal was to achieve a true telepresence illusion for the remote partners. For this purpose, intermediate views at arbitrary positions must be synthesized from the views of a stereoscopic camera system with rather large baseline. The actual viewpoint is adapted according to the head position of the viewer, such that the impression of motion parallax is produced. The whole system consists of a disparity estimator, stereoscopic MPEG-2 encoder, disparity encoder and multiplexer at the transmitter side, and a demultiplexer, disparity decoder, MPEG-2 decoder and interpolator with viewpoint adaptation at the receiver side. For transmission of the encoded signals, an ATM network is provided. In the final system, autostereoscopic displays will be used. The algorithms for disparity estimation, disparity encoding and disparity-driven intermediate viewpoint synthesis were specifically developed under the constraint of hardware feasibility.