Real-time stereo-vision system for 3D teleimmersive collaboration

Though the variety of desktop real time stereo vision systems has grown considerably in the past several years, few make any verifiable claims about the accuracy of the algorithms used to construct 3D data or describe how the data generated by such systems, which is large in size, can be effectively distributed. In this paper, we describe a system that creates an accurate (on the order of a centimeter), 3D reconstruction of an environment in real time (under 30 ms) that also allows for remote interaction between users. This paper addresses how to reconstruct, compress, and visualize the 3D environment. In contrast to most commercial desktop real time stereo vision systems our algorithm produces 3D meshes instead of dense point clouds, which we show allows for better quality visualizations. The chosen representation of the data also allows for high compression ratios for transfer to remote sites. We demonstrate the accuracy and speed of our results on a variety of benchmarks.