Telepresence by Real-Time View-Dependent Image Generation from Omnidirectional Images

The significance of telepresence technology, which provides visual display of remote scenes, is growing in such fields as remote operation of mobile robots and multiperson videoconferencing. For the purpose of tracking the sight of a user observing a remote scene, a camera mounted on a movable stage is normally employed; in so doing, however, time delays occur in sight tracking and image display. In this paper, a telepresence system is proposed that provides generation and display of view-dependent perspective images by means of omnidirectional images captured through a HyperOmni Vision sensor; hardly any time delays are found to be related to line-of-sight change. This system is suitable for both real-time telepresence and store-and-forward playback telepresence. In addition, the system may be easily extended to support multiple users with different sight directions. © 2000 Scripta Technica.