R-letter of August 2013 - IEEE Communications Society

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IEEE COMSOC MMTC R-LetterDoes Kinect Provide a Simply and Cheap Solution for Telepresence?A short review for ”Enhanced Personal Autostereoscopic Telepresence System UsingCommodity Depth Cameras“Edited by Irene ChengAndrew Maimone, Jonathan Bidwell, Kun Peng and Henry Fuchs, “Enhanced PersonalAutostereoscopic Telepresence System Using Commodity Depth Cameras”, Elsevier:Computers & Graphics 36 (2012) 791-807.Telepresence technology enables a user to feelengaged as if he/she is a part of the virtual scene.“Telepresence” and “Kinect” are often associatedwhen either keyword is searched on the Internet.Applications, starting from the entertaining“Kinect Star Wars” to Kinect-based medicalimage exploration and collaborative telepresencein a social setting, have become commonplacesince the launch of Kinect depth sensors in 2010.The paper presents a low-cost Kinect-basedtelepresence system that offers real-time 3Dscene capturing and head-tracked stereo 3Ddisplay without the user wearing any eyeweardevice. The system is an enhancement of theauthors previous version published in ISMAR2011 [1]. There have been quite a fewtelepresence systems being developed before, butnone of them is based on Kinect and addressesthe many issues associated with an array of depthsensors. The appearling features about Kinect liein its low cost and simplicity. The paper shows away to develop a cheap telepresence system,which was traditionally of high cost. But Kinectalso brings in unique challenges includingvarious artifacts in depth maps such as holes andnoises, and the interference among multipleKinects. Many existing techniques are employedor adapted by the authors for denoising, holefilling,smoothing, data merger, surfacegeneration, color correction and head tracking.The system takes advantage of a fully GPUaccelerateddata processing and renderingpipeline. The main contribution lies in theintegration of various existing techniques todeliver a workable solution. The completesoftware and hardware framework forimplementing the system is presented, includingGPU-acceleration.The Introduction gives a flavor of the evolutionof 3D data acquisition using depth cameras andvisualization using eyewear in a telepresenceenvironment since late 90s’. The proposedsystem is based on the inexpensive MicrosoftKinect sensor, providing a 58° x 45° field ofview with high depth accuracy. After propersensors calibration, an entire room-sized scenecan be captured in real-time. By combining 2Deye detection technique and depth data, Kinect isable to offer a markerless tracking solution.However, there are challenges that the authorsencountered in using Kinect sensors forimplementing their system. Inter-unitinterference is a major problem because eachsensor projects a fixed structured light pattern ofsimilar wavelengths. There is also difficulty forpresenting seamless integration of color-matcheddata between cameras. Thus the enhancementsinclude introducing a software solution to theKinect interference problem and a visibilitybasedmethod to merge data between cameras, aswell as for dynamic color matching betweencolor-plus-depth cameras. The hardwareconfiguration and software implementation aredetailed in the paper. Interested readers can referto Section 4.2 to understand how the multi-Kinect interference problem is addressed. Colormatching is a common problem in many camerasystems. Even the same camera model deviceoften exhibits different color gamuts [2] and soas Kinect sensors. The current available Kinectdriver (at the time of this paper) allows onlyautomatic color and exposure control. Thus colorvalues can vary dramatically between adjacentsensors. Here the authors argue that applyingtraditional color matching techniques isineffective because automatic control may altercolor balances. They introduce using depthinformation to find color correspondencesbetween cameras and build a color matchingfunction. Details are described in Section 4.6.Another enhancement explored in this paper isrelated to eye position tracking accuracy, speedand latency described in Section 4.7.Comparison of results shows the goodperformance of the proposed telepresencesystem. In the Conclusion, the authors point outthat although the system is functional, the outputhttp://committees.comsoc.org/mmc 6/22 Vol.4, No.4, August 2013
IEEE COMSOC MMTC R-Letterimage quality still needs improvement, and inparticular the temporal noise artifacts present atthe edges of objects at depth pixel level. Insteadof presenting all the technical discussions andcomputational analysis, what I like about thispaper is its clarity and readability. A shortoverview suitable for the general readers is givenat the beginning of each section followed by aAcknowledgement:This paper is nominated by Jianfei Cai of theMMTC 3D Processing, Rendering andCommunication (3DPRC) Interest Group.References:[1] Ilie A, Welch G. Ensuring colorconsistency across multiple cameras. In:Proceedings of the tenth IEEE internationalconference on computer vision – volume 2.ICCV ’05; Washington, DC, USA: IEEEComputer Society; 2005, p. 1268–75. ISBN0-7695-2334-X-02.http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICCV.2005.88[1] Maimone A, Fuchs H. Encumbrance-freetelepresence system with real-time 3dcapture and display using commodity depthcameras. In: Tenth IEEE internationalsymposium on mixed and augmentedreality (ISMAR); 2011. p. 137–46.http://dx.doi.org.10.1109/ISMAR.2011.6092379.more in-depth explanation. The developedsystem shows a promising way to bringtelepresence to common users, which willstimulate more subsequent multimediacommunication research.Irene Cheng, SMIEEE isthe Scientific Director ofthe Multimedia ResearchCentre, and an AdjunctProfessor in the Faculty ofScience, as well as theFaculty of Medicine &Dentistry, University ofAlberta, Canada. She isalso a Research Affiliatewith the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Alberta,Canada. She is a Co-Chair of the IEEE SMC Society,Human Perception in Vision, Graphics andMultimedia Technical Committee; was the Chair ofthe IEEE Northern Canada Section, Engineering inMedicine and Biological Science (EMBS) Chapter(2009-2011), and the Chair of the IEEECommunication Society, Multimedia TechnicalCommittee 3D Processing, Render andCommunication (MMTC) Interest Group (2010-2012).She is now the Director of the Review-Letter EditorialBoard of MMTC (2012-2014).Over the last ten years, she has more than 110international peer-reviewed publications including 2books and 31 journals. Her research interests includemultimedia communication techniques, Quality ofExperience (QoE), Levels-of-detail, 3D GraphicsVisualization and Perceptual Quality Evaluation. Inparticular, she introduced applying human perception– Just-Noticeable-Difference – followingpsychophysical methodology to generate multi-scale3D models.http://committees.comsoc.org/mmc 7/22 Vol.4, No.4, August 2013
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