A Pilot Study of Video Compression Techniques for Stereoscopic Telepresence Applications

This paper focuses on evaluating and quantifying the effects of a novel foveated stereo video compression algorithm for visual telepresence applications. In a typical telepresence application, a user at the local site views real-time stereo video captured and transmitted from a telerobotic camera platform located at a remote site. The telerobotic camera platform tracks the user's head motion, producing the sensation of being present at the remote site. Three valuable factors were examined: foveation, disparity compression, and global motion compensation. The algorithm was analyzed by introducing the above-mentioned components separately. It was found that each component increased the compression rate significantly.