An object-based system for stereoscopic viewpoint synthesis

This paper describes algorithms that were developed for a real-time stereoscopic videoconferencing systems with viewpoint adaptation. The goal is a real telepresence illusion, which is achieved by synthesis of intermediate views from a stereoscopic camera shot with a rather large baseline. The actual viewpoint will be adapted according to the head position of the viewer, such that the impression of motion parallax is produced. The object-based system first identifies foreground and background regions and applies disparity estimation to the foreground object. A hierarchical block matching algorithm is employed for this purpose which takes into account the position of high-activity feature points and the object/background border positions. Using the disparity estimator's output, it is possible to generate arbitrary intermediate views by projections from the left- and right-view images. For this purpose, we have also developed an object-based interpolation algorithm, taking into account a very simple convex-surface model of a person's face and body. Though the algorithms had to be held rather simple under the constraint of hardware feasibility, we obtain a good quality of the intermediate-view images. Finally, we describe the hardware concept for the disparity estimator, which is the most complicated part of the algorithm.