Real-Time Transmission of 3D Video to Multiple Users via Network

This paper presents a method to transmit live 3D videos in a soccer stadium and display them at remote PCs for users who watch soccer games. All processes are done in real time, including soccer scene capture with multiple cameras, image analysis, data transmission, and 3D video display. To generate and transmit 3D video via network in real time, each player is represented by “player-billboard” which is composed of one rectangle and associated live texture. Because a player-billboard does not require precise 3D shape reconstruction of each player, computation cost and data size required to generate live 3D videos are very low. In order to show the validity of our method, we captured multiple videos in a real soccer stadium and transmitted 3D video to remote multiple users simultaneously. The result proved our system can transmit 3D video at 15-24 [frames/sec] through the Internet.