A Fast Vision-based Head Tracking Method for Interactive Stereoscopic Viewing

In this paper, the problem of a viewer's head tracking in a desktop-based interactive stereoscopic display system is considered. A fast and low-cost approach to the problem is important for such a computing environment. The system under consideration utilizes a shuttle glass for stereoscopic display. The proposed method makes use of an image taken from a single low-cost video camera. By using a simple feature extraction algorithm, the obtained points corresponding to the image of the user-worn shuttle glass are used to estimate the glass center, its local 'yaw' angle, as measured with respect to the glass center, and its global 'yaw' angle as measured with respect to the camera location. With these estimations, the stereoscopic image synthetic program utilizes those values to interactively adjust the two-view stereoscopic image pair as displayed on a computer screen. The adjustment is carried out such that the so-obtained stereoscopic picture, when viewed from a current user position, provides a close-to-real perspective and depth perception. However, because the algorithm and device used are designed for fast computation, the estimation is typically not precise enough to provide a flicker-free interactive viewing. An error concealment method is thus proposed to alleviate the problem. This concealment method should be sufficient for applications that do not require a high degree of visual realism and interaction.