Stereo camera system and its application in networked virtual environment

With the appearance of different kinds of networked virtual environment systems, the technology of realistic video avatar has become a hotspot of research. How to create realistic video avatar with less hardware investment and limited computation is one of the purposes of these researches. We introduce a method that combines a single stereo camera system and a 3D head model to create a realistic video avatar. To create the video avatar´s most important part-the face, we use a 2D image and a depth map, which is generated by the stereo camera system. The other parts of of the video avatar are created by mapping the head´s texture to the 3D head model.