EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2002 (2002), Issue 6, Pages 622-634
doi:10.1155/S1110865702204059

A Standard-Compliant Virtual Meeting System with Active Video Object Tracking

Chia-Wen Lin,1 Yao-Jen Chang,2 Chih-Ming Wang,2 Yung-Chang Chen,2 and Ming-Ting Sun3

 1Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi 621, Taiwan
2Department of Electrical Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan
3Information Processing Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle 98195, WA, USA
Received 2 October 2001; Revised 24 March 2002

Abstract

This paper presents an H.323 standard compliant virtual video conferencing system. The proposed system not only serves as a multipoint control unit (MCU) for multipoint connection but also provides a gateway function between the H.323 LAN (local-area network) and the H.324 WAN (wide-area network) users. The proposed virtual video conferencing system provides user-friendly object compositing and manipulation features including 2D video object scaling, repositioning, rotation, and dynamic bit-allocation in a 3D virtual environment. A reliable, and accurate scheme based on background image mosaics is proposed for real-time extracting and tracking foreground video objects from the video captured with an active camera. Chroma-key insertion is used to facilitate video objects extraction and manipulation. We have implemented a prototype of the virtual conference system with an integrated graphical user interface to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methods.