Automatic Head-size Equalization in Panorama Images for Video Conferencing

In panorama images captured by omni-directional cameras during video conferencing, the image sizes of the people around the conference table are not uniform due to the varying distances to the camera. Spatially varying-uniform (SVU) scaling functions have been proposed to warp a panorama image smoothly such that the participants have similar sizes on the image. To generate the SVU function, one needs to segment the table boundaries, which was generated manually in the previous work. In this paper, we propose a robust algorithm to automatically segment the table boundaries. To ensure the robustness, we apply a symmetry voting scheme to filter out noisy points on the edge map. Trigonometry and quadratic fitting methods are developed to fit a continuous curve to the remaining edge points. We report experimental results on both synthetic and real images.