High speed view interpolation for tele-teaching and tele-conferencing

This paper presents an algorithm to generate an interpolated view between two camera viewpoints in a fast and automatic way (6-7 fps on a PentIV @ 2.6 GHz, Geforce FX AGP 4). Nothing more than a desktop PC and a set of low end consumer grade cameras are needed to simulate the video stream of any intermediate camera. Parallel use of the GPU (´plane sweep´ algorithm) and the CPU (´min-cut/max-flow´ regularisation algorithm) is made to calculate the depth values. The final interpolations for any intermediate camera position are obtained by a projectively correct blended warp of the input images on a 3D mesh. Limited extrapolation is also feasible. The goal is to develop more advanced tele-teaching and videoconferencing environments, and this without the need of many cameras. Camera movements can be simulated and the best view can be selected whether this is recorded by a real camera or not. Compared to putting a human editor in control, the cost decreases dramatically, without losing all the added value of video stream editing.