| Research Mission: |
The VCAI group is involved in cutting-edge research for visual computing by means of artificial intelligence. A key priority is to promote visual realism in remote reality/ telepresence applications to the human user. 3D impression is achieved by providing omnidirectional (360°) stereo vision.
The user is thereby equipped with a binocular Head Mounted Display (HMD), such as the VR system Oculus Rift, where the visual content can either be monoscopic or stereoscopic. While in the monoscopic case, the same content is shown for both eyes, a stereoscopic visualization provides the sense and perception of depth by providing different imagery from separate vantage points per eye. Stereoscopic VR systems enable a 3D impression and, hence, provision a more realistic and immersive experience of the remote environment. Most 360° videos available nowadays on platforms like YouTube or Facebook are mostly monoscopic and, thus, do not provide the perception of depth, even though when watched through an HMD.
In the case of telepresence, where the visual content needs to be streamed from a remote vision system to a local user over a communication network, the primary goal is to develop vision systems that are not only realtime capable but also provide omnidirectional 3D impression through stereo vision while keeping the computational and financial burden low. However, sending two complete monocular 360° videos would require substantial communication capacity, even though large portions of the imagery are not displayed to the user. Smart acquisition, streaming and rendering strategies are hence needed to avoid claiming large parts of the communication network with unused data. The main challenge is to select the user's prospective viewport portions ahead of time, especially when streamed over a communication network. The latency between the remote vision system and the local users causes incongruities between ego-motion and visual response, which is denoted as Motion-to-Photon (M2P) latency, and provokes the user to suffer from visual discomfort when exceeding a certain threshold. The VCAI group works on sophisticated algorithmic and AI-based solutions to overcome the QoE-limiting M2P latency while maintaining a high degree of visual comfort. |
