5,620 research outputs found
An Immersive Telepresence System using RGB-D Sensors and Head Mounted Display
We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each
other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal
communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online
conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be
particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and
interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose
recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and
manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the
instructor to ef- fectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex
concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The highly
interactive and flexible environment can capture and sustain more student
attention than the traditional classroom setting and, thus, delivers a
compelling experience to the students. Our main focus here is to investigate
possible solutions for the system design and implementation and devise
strategies for fast, efficient computation suitable for visual data processing
and network transmission. We describe the technique and experiments in details
and provide quantitative performance results, demonstrating our system can be
run comfortably and reliably for different application scenarios. Our
preliminary results are promising and demonstrate the potential for more
compelling directions in cyberlearning.Comment: IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 201
RLFC: Random Access Light Field Compression using Key Views and Bounded Integer Encoding
We present a new hierarchical compression scheme for encoding light field
images (LFI) that is suitable for interactive rendering. Our method (RLFC)
exploits redundancies in the light field images by constructing a tree
structure. The top level (root) of the tree captures the common high-level
details across the LFI, and other levels (children) of the tree capture
specific low-level details of the LFI. Our decompressing algorithm corresponds
to tree traversal operations and gathers the values stored at different levels
of the tree. Furthermore, we use bounded integer sequence encoding which
provides random access and fast hardware decoding for compressing the blocks of
children of the tree. We have evaluated our method for 4D two-plane
parameterized light fields. The compression rates vary from 0.08 - 2.5 bits per
pixel (bpp), resulting in compression ratios of around 200:1 to 20:1 for a PSNR
quality of 40 to 50 dB. The decompression times for decoding the blocks of LFI
are 1 - 3 microseconds per channel on an NVIDIA GTX-960 and we can render new
views with a resolution of 512X512 at 200 fps. Our overall scheme is simple to
implement and involves only bit manipulations and integer arithmetic
operations.Comment: Accepted for publication at Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and
Games (I3D '19
A framework for realistic 3D tele-immersion
Meeting, socializing and conversing online with a group of people using teleconferencing systems is still quite differ- ent from the experience of meeting face to face. We are abruptly aware that we are online and that the people we are engaging with are not in close proximity. Analogous to how talking on the telephone does not replicate the experi- ence of talking in person. Several causes for these differences have been identified and we propose inspiring and innova- tive solutions to these hurdles in attempt to provide a more realistic, believable and engaging online conversational expe- rience. We present the distributed and scalable framework REVERIE that provides a balanced mix of these solutions. Applications build on top of the REVERIE framework will be able to provide interactive, immersive, photo-realistic ex- periences to a multitude of users that for them will feel much more similar to having face to face meetings than the expe- rience offered by conventional teleconferencing systems
Joint Material and Illumination Estimation from Photo Sets in the Wild
Faithful manipulation of shape, material, and illumination in 2D Internet
images would greatly benefit from a reliable factorization of appearance into
material (i.e., diffuse and specular) and illumination (i.e., environment
maps). On the one hand, current methods that produce very high fidelity
results, typically require controlled settings, expensive devices, or
significant manual effort. To the other hand, methods that are automatic and
work on 'in the wild' Internet images, often extract only low-frequency
lighting or diffuse materials. In this work, we propose to make use of a set of
photographs in order to jointly estimate the non-diffuse materials and sharp
lighting in an uncontrolled setting. Our key observation is that seeing
multiple instances of the same material under different illumination (i.e.,
environment), and different materials under the same illumination provide
valuable constraints that can be exploited to yield a high-quality solution
(i.e., specular materials and environment illumination) for all the observed
materials and environments. Similar constraints also arise when observing
multiple materials in a single environment, or a single material across
multiple environments. The core of this approach is an optimization procedure
that uses two neural networks that are trained on synthetic images to predict
good gradients in parametric space given observation of reflected light. We
evaluate our method on a range of synthetic and real examples to generate
high-quality estimates, qualitatively compare our results against
state-of-the-art alternatives via a user study, and demonstrate
photo-consistent image manipulation that is otherwise very challenging to
achieve
Learning to Predict Image-based Rendering Artifacts with Respect to a Hidden Reference Image
Image metrics predict the perceived per-pixel difference between a reference
image and its degraded (e. g., re-rendered) version. In several important
applications, the reference image is not available and image metrics cannot be
applied. We devise a neural network architecture and training procedure that
allows predicting the MSE, SSIM or VGG16 image difference from the distorted
image alone while the reference is not observed. This is enabled by two
insights: The first is to inject sufficiently many un-distorted natural image
patches, which can be found in arbitrary amounts and are known to have no
perceivable difference to themselves. This avoids false positives. The second
is to balance the learning, where it is carefully made sure that all image
errors are equally likely, avoiding false negatives. Surprisingly, we observe,
that the resulting no-reference metric, subjectively, can even perform better
than the reference-based one, as it had to become robust against
mis-alignments. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach in an image-based
rendering context, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we
demonstrate two applications which reduce light field capture time and provide
guidance for interactive depth adjustment.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure
An Immersive Telepresence System using RGB-D Sensors and Head-mounted Display
We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to effectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The highly interactive and flexible environment can capture and sustain more student attention than the traditional classroom setting and, thus, delivers a compelling experience to the students. Our main focus here is to investigate possible solutions for the system design and implementation and devise strategies for fast, efficient computation suitable for visual data processing and network transmission. We describe the technique and experiments in details and provide quantitative performance results, demonstrating our system can be run comfortably and reliably for different application scenarios. Our preliminary results are promising and demonstrate the potential for more compelling directions in cyberlearning
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