Video realistic avatar for virtual face-to-face conferencing

Facial animation standardized by MPEG-4 provides a common form of description and transmission for talking head related applications. With animated talking heads, a virtual conferencing system can be created by providing a 3-D virtual environment for face-to-face communication and casual navigation. Not only bit-rate consumption is reduced, 3-D visualization is also provided which greatly improves the sense of presence when compared to conventional video conferencing system. An integrated architecture is presented by taking advantage of 2-D video coding and 3-D model-based coding to create video realistic avatars for virtual face-to-face conferencing system. Preliminary experimental results indicate more than 4 dB improvement in PSNR can be achieved at the same bit rate when compared to conventional video coding. The incorporation of 3-D facial models also enables rendering from arbitrary viewpoints for use in a virtual conferencing system.