VIDEO BRIDGING FOR MULTIPOINT VIDEO CONFERENCING

With the growth of video conferencing, the need for multipoint confere nces is also growing. In a multipoint videoconference over a wide-area network, the users are connected to a multipoint control unit (MCU) i n a central office. A video bridge in the MCU combines the input video streams into a suitable format for presentation. In this article, we discuss various approaches of video bridging for continuous presence m ultipoint video conferencing. We also discuss the video quality issues and describe some multipoint video bridge prototypes we have develope d. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.