Very low bit rate coding using hybrid synthetic/real images for multisite videoconference applications
Henri Nicolas, Jean Motsch · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
This paper proposes a new methodology to deal with videoconference applications in which several different sties can be involved. In such applications, it should be interesting for each user to watch only one image which gives him the impression that everybody is in the same virtual room. Furthermore, since it can be expected that only a very limited transmission bandwidth is available, it is important to transmit only useful information. For these reasons, we have developed a technique which consists in the creation of a hybrid synthetic/natural scene. This hybrid scene contains the real images of each interlocutor of the multi-sites videoconference. This permits to reduce the bitrate since only the regions of interest contained in the real video data must be coded and transmitted. In practice, the background of the scene, which has generally no interest for users, is not coded. The extraction of these regions of interest is performed of the scene, which has generally no interest for users, is not coded. The extraction of these regions of interest is performed by a new detection algorithm based on a reference image. In order to manage occlusion and collision problems in the hybrid images, a 3D positioning strategy of 2D real objects has been developed. Experimental results are presented on real videoconference- like image sequences.