A Foveated Imaging System to Reduce Transmission Bandwidth of Video Images from Remote Camera Systems
Abstract
This is the final progress report for a joint project between Geisler's laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin and OWL Displays Inc., to develop a real time variable resolution (foveated) imaging system for video communications tasks such as remote control of unmanned vehicles. Although the OWL side of the project might best be described as a modest success, we believe the software and software/hardware integration performed at UT has been a big success. A general purpose real time linkable library (for Pentium class computers running the Windows95/98/NT OS) has been developed for coding and decoding variable resolution static images and video, both in 8 bit gray scale and 24 bit color. We have tested our real time software in conjunction with MPEG (H.263) and shown that it generally produces very substantial bandwidth savings both for T frames and P frames. We have also developed our own real time image compression library which includes fast motion compensation, fast pyramid coding, fast zero tree coding and arithmetic coding. The foveated imaging software has been successfully interfaced and tested with a 512x512 8 bit b/w camera and two separate eye trackers: an ASL desktop heads free eye tracker and the OWL/ASL V8 helmet mounted eye tracker.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1998
- Accession Number
- ADA358811
Entities
People
- H. L. Webb
- Wilson S. Geisler
Organizations
- University of Texas at Austin