Foveated multipoint videoconferencing at low bit rates

Multipoint videoconferencing (MPVC) involves three or more participants engaged in video communication over a network. A video server combines the video streams from each participant and then broadcasts the resulting stream to all participants. In this paper, we propose to use foveation, which is non-uniform resolution representation of an image reflecting the sampling in the retina, to reduce the bandwidth requirements of MPVC. We develop foveated MPVC algorithms for variable and constant bit rate MPVC. We show that foveated MPVC can provide considerable bit rate savings, and for the same bit rate, provide improvement in subjective quality.