CuteChat: A Lightweight Tele-immersive Video Chat System

摘要

This paper presents a lightweight tele-immersive video chat system named CuteChat. Based on our recently developed video object cutout technology, the CuteChat system is designed and optimized to provide a radically new video chat experience by merging each participant in the same shared space, allowing them to interact more naturally in an integrated manner. With the goal to make the system easily accessible by massive consumers, we address the challenges in the whole pipeline of video processing, coding, communication, composition, and playback. Extensive experiments have shown that the proposed CuteChat system runs reliably and comfortably in real time on one's laptop or desktop PC, and it needs only a commodity webcam for video acquisition and just public Internet for tele-immersive video conferencing. With such a really minimal deployment requirement, we present a variety of interesting applications and user experiences created by the CuteChat system.