An efficient image-based telepresence system for videoconferencing

In this paper, we describe the view representation and reconstruction module for an image-based telepresence system, based on a viewpoint-adaptation scheme and the image-based rendering technique. For real-time three-dimensional synthesis, a parallel version of our multistep view reconstruction algorithm is realized on dedicated hardware based on Trimedia digital signal processors. A new scalable representation, named middle view stereo representation (MVSR), is further constructed to be able to adapt to the bandwidth requirement of the broadcasting network. Experiments show the promising performance of the parallel realization of the multistep view reconstruction method and the power of the MVSR representation.