Low-cost real time scalable hardware platform for capturing and calibrating video

Telepresence refers to the impression of being in an environment generated by multi-media technology. In this article, the capturing system for a real-time telepresence environment is presented. A fully scalable architecture is proposed allowing the control of a large number of cameras with a low-cost platform and only one PC. The system will capture, transform and calibrate the video from the cameras and then generate the output in RGB format. The article presents a lowcost system that reduces the overheads in terms of memory and area while providing data in real time for a high-quality image format.