A Solution to Face-to-Face Contact in Tele-presence Systems

In tele-presence systems, direct face-to-face contact, is essential for emotional communication as it carries non-verbal clues. In commercial products, face-to-face contact is approximated by using either a large semi-transparent mirror to project an image of the remote participant and capture the local participant image by using a video camera aiming at the centre of the screen or by using low profile cameras. These systems are very cumbersome and require complex hardware and software setups. In this paper, we propose a low cost solution to face-to-face contact correction problem in tele-presence systems using active stereo triangulation.