Implementation of H.323 Compliant Virtual Meeting Systems

Abstract

This paper presents an H.323 standard compliant video conference system implementation. The proposed system not only serves as an MCU (Multipoint Control Unit) for multipoint connection but also provides the gateway function between the H.323 LAN (Local Area Network) and the H.324 WAN (Wide Area Network) users. The proposed video conference system supports two operation modes. The baseline mode provides a split-screen continuous presence display so that each conferee can see all the others simultaneously. The advance mode provides more user-friendly object compositing and manipulation features including 2-D video object scaling, re-positioning, rotating, and dynamic bit-allocation in a 3-D virtual environment. A segmentation scheme based on pre-stored background information is proposed for real-time segmentation of the foreground video objects at the client side. Chroma-key insertion is used for object extraction to facilitate video object manipulation. We also present a geometric transformation scheme and its real-time implementation for video objects manipulation. We have implemented a virtual conference system prototype to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methods.