Multi-view synthesis for an extendable teleconferencing system

Current teleconferencing configuration and synthesis solutions tend to be rigid and system specific. We present a new extendable system created from building blocks defined as Stereo Camera Analysis Blocks (SCAB). SCABs consist of axe-parallel narrow baseline stereo cameras. We define a new approach to virtual view creation from multiple images in our Multi-View Synthesis (MVS) block. MVS 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. This unique teleconferencing system is both scalable: depending on the display size and number of conferees SCABs can be added or removed, and modular: the MVS process being dynamic enough to produce virtual views from a multiple SCAB set-up.