Abstract
This paper presents an H.323 standard compliant video conferencing system implementation. The proposed system not only serves as an MCU (Multipoint Control Unit) for multipoint connection but also provides a gateway function between the H.323 LAN (Local Area Network) and the H.324 WAN (Wide Area Network) users. The proposed video conferencing system provides 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 prestored background information is proposed for real-time segmentation of the foreground video objects at the client side. Chroma-key insertion is used to facilitate video objects extraction and manipulation. We have implemented the virtual conference system prototype with an integrated graphic user interface to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methods.