Bringing Telepresence to Every Desk
This work addresses the need for accessible telepresence technology for average consumers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing free-viewpoint video methods.
The paper tackles the problem of making personal 3D video conferencing affordable and efficient by introducing a system that uses 4 consumer-grade RGBD cameras to synthesize high-quality free-viewpoint videos of users and environments, without requiring object templates or heavy pre-processing.
In this paper, we work to bring telepresence to every desktop. Unlike commercial systems, personal 3D video conferencing systems must render high-quality videos while remaining financially and computationally viable for the average consumer. To this end, we introduce a capturing and rendering system that only requires 4 consumer-grade RGBD cameras and synthesizes high-quality free-viewpoint videos of users as well as their environments. Experimental results show that our system renders high-quality free-viewpoint videos without using object templates or heavy pre-processing. While not real-time, our system is fast and does not require per-video optimizations. Moreover, our system is robust to complex hand gestures and clothing, and it can generalize to new users. This work provides a strong basis for further optimization, and it will help bring telepresence to every desk in the near future. The code and dataset will be made available on our website https://mcmvmc.github.io/PersonalTelepresence/.