Efficient video compression methods for a lightweight tele-immersive video chat system

A lightweight tele-immersive (TI) video chat system named CuteChat has been developed recently to provide a radically new video chat experience by merging each participant in the same shared space, allowing them to interact more naturally in an integrated manner. This paper presents an insight of the coding component in the system. Specifically, we present an efficient standard-compliant method to compress and deliver video contents in a more semantic manner. Taking into account the characteristics of real-life video chat sequences, we also propose a low-complexity coding method to significantly reduce the encoder complexity while retaining acceptable visual quality. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed methods in comparison with the existing methods.