A modular approach to virtual view creation for a scalable immersive teleconferencing configuration

This paper details a new modular approach to virtual view creation that is designed to work in conjunction with a proposed scalable teleconferencing configuration. This scalable system is configured using building blocks defined as stereo camera analysis blocks (SCAB). SCABs consist of axe-parallel narrow baseline stereo cameras. These provide design flexibility and improve the image analysis process. Virtual view creation is modular in such that we can add or remove SCABs based on our particular requirements without having to modify the view synthesis algorithm. A new approach to virtual view creation from multiple images is defined. This contains two separate processes: surface segmentation, which identifies surfaces, and surface selection and merging, which selects and integrates the best view of a required surface into the virtual view. The surfaces are identified via a sampling density function while the surface selection procedure is based on a weighting scheme.