Teleconferencing system using virtual camera

Abstract

Teleconferencing systems are becoming more popular because of advance in image processing and broadband network. Nevertheless, communicating with someone at a remote location through a teleconferencing system still presents problems because of the difficulty of establishing and maintaining eye contact. Eye contact is essential to having a natural dialog. The purpose of our study is to make eye contact possible during dialog by using image processing with no particular devices, such as color markers, sensors, which are equipped users with and infrared cameras. Proposed teleconferencing system is composed of a computer, a display attached to the computer, and four cameras. We define virtual camera as the camera, which exists virtually in 3D space. By using the proposed method, we can acquire a front view of a person that is taken with the virtual camera. The image taken with virtual camera is generated by extracting a same feature point among four face images. Feature point sets among four face images are automatically corresponded by using Epipolar Plane Images(EPIs). The users can establish eye contact by acquiring the front face view, and moreover, they also can obtain various views of the image because 3D points of the object can be extracted from EPIs. Through these facilities, the proposed system will provide users with better communication than previous systems. In this paper, we describe the concept, implementation and the evaluation are described in various perspective.