System and method for very low frame rate teleconferencing employing image morphing and cropping
First Claim
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1. A system for compressing data for video conferencing, comprising:
- a general purpose computing device; and
a computer program comprising program modules executable by the computing device, wherein the computing device is directed by the program modules of the computer program to,capture a sequence of images some containing a person'"'"'s face;
locate the person'"'"'s face in each of the images in the sequence that contain a face;
select some of the images that contain a face; and
transmit only the face region including eyes of the selected images.
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Abstract
A real-time low frame-rate video compression system and method that allows the user to perform face-to-face communication through an extremely low bandwidth network. The system and method employs image cropping and morphing to reduce frame rates. At the encoder side, the system is able to automatically select only a few good faces from the original sequence with high visual quality and compress and transmit them. At the decoder side, the system use image-morphing based rendering method to generate a normal frame-rate video. Experimental results show that the system is superior to more traditional video codecs for low bit-rate face-to-face communication.
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Citations
14 Claims
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1. A system for compressing data for video conferencing, comprising:
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a general purpose computing device; and a computer program comprising program modules executable by the computing device, wherein the computing device is directed by the program modules of the computer program to, capture a sequence of images some containing a person'"'"'s face; locate the person'"'"'s face in each of the images in the sequence that contain a face; select some of the images that contain a face; and transmit only the face region including eyes of the selected images. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3)
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4. A process for low frame rate video conferencing, comprising the process actions of:
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inputting a video frame which possibly contains a face; processing said video frame to locate a face; if a face is found, processing the face to locate features of the face, but if no face is found no longer processing said frame; if features are found, using the features to perform image morphing to align said face in said frame with a face in a previous input frame; subtracting said face in said frame from said face in said previously input frame to obtain a residual of said face; encoding said residual of said face with a video encoder; transmitting the encoded residual of the face with feature control parameters to a video conference participant. - View Dependent Claims (5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)
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12. A process for encoding video to compensate for motion between frames, comprising the process actions of:
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inputting a sequence of frames, some of said frames containing a face; calculating the differences in eye locations between two consecutive frames which contain a face; estimating the location of the mouth in the two consecutive frames based on an initially marked frame; creating a morph mesh using said differences in eye locations and said estimated mouth locations between consecutive frames; morphing each frame in the sequence to the previous consecutive frame in the sequence; subtracting each morphed frame from the previous frame to obtain a residual image; encoding the residual and the eye and mouth locations; transmitting the encoded residual and the eye and mouth locations; decoding the residual; adding the residual to the previously received frame to produce a new frame; unmorphing the new frame based on the transmitted eye and mouth locations; and displaying the new frame while cross-dissolving from the previously received frame. - View Dependent Claims (13, 14)
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Specification