Viewpoint interpolation using an ellipsoid head model for video teleconferencing

Abstract

To establish eye contact in video teleconferencing, it is necessary to synthesize a front view image by viewpoint interpolation. After finding the viewing direction of a user, we can interpolate an image seen from the viewpoint, which will result in a front view image. There are two categories of previous research: image based method and model based method. The former is simple, however, it shows limited performance for complex objects. And the latter is robust to noise, whereas it is computationally expensive. We propose to model a face with an ellipsoid and show that the new method is simple and robust from various experiments.