TELEPRESENCE BY REAL-TIME VIEW-DEPENDENT IMAGE GENERATION FROM OMNIDIRECTIONAL VIDEO STREAMS

This paper describes a new approach to telepresence which realizes vir tual tours into a visualized dynamic real world without significant ti me delay. We propose a novel concept of instantour which enables us to instantly look around a visualized space of a dynamic real world. The instantour is realized by the following two steps: (1) video-rate omn idirectional image acquisition and (2) realtime view-dependent perspec tive image generation from an omnidirectional video stream. The propos ed technique is applicable to real-time telepresence in the situation where the real world to be seen is far from an observation site, becau se the time delay from the change of viewing direction to the change o f displayed image does not depend on the actual distance between both sites. Moreover, multiple users can look around from a single viewpoin t in a visualized dynamic real world in different directions at the sa me time, The proposed technique is also useful for another type of tel epresence which uses recorded omnidirectional video streams, We have d eveloped a prototype of virtual instantour system and have successfull y experimented with real dynamic scenes. (C) 1998 Academic Press.