Thierry Tapie

Real-time expression-sensitive HMD face reconstruction

One of the main issues of current Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) is that they hide completely the wearers face. This can be an issue in social experiences where two or more users want to share the 3D immersive experience. We propose a novel method to recover the face of the user in real-time. First, we learn the user appearance offline by building a 3D textured model of his head from a series of pictures. Then, by calibrating the camera and tracking the HMDs position in real-time we reproject the model on top of the video frames mimicking exactly the users head pose. Finally, we remove the HMD and replace the occluded part of the face in a seamingless manner by performing image in-painting with the background. We further propose an extension to detect facial expressions on the visible part of the face and use it to change the upper face model accordingly. We show the promise of our method via some qualitative results on a variety of users.

Home networking as a distributed file system view

Devices forming a Home Network have different capabilities and interfaces, discouraging users to organize their large digital content libraries. To help users, we propose to organize the Home Network according to a gateway-centric architecture, where the content access unification is realized at the file system level and where no additional software installation on devices is required. Solutions for realizing this unification individually exist for the various devices making up the Home Network (UPnP/DLNA devices, personal computers, cloud storage systems, etc). Unifying the content access at the file system level offers a powerful lever for many legacy applications, as far as these applications can access all shared data in the Home Network. Users can thus continue to use their PCs file manager or favorite media player to browse or display shared content. An indexing application, running on the gateway, possibly managed by the ISP and accessible from any device via a simple web interface, enables more powerful content retrieval and user experience. Such application may be enriched to offer additional services like content format adaptation, duplication detection or automatic backup. Lastly we describe how this gateway-centric architecture can be leveraged by cloud applications such as distributed storage systems.

Implementation of a TV studio based on Ethernet and the IP protocol stack

ó A small scale TV studio based on an AVB Ethernet network and the IP protocol stack has been presented. ó The main components of this IPTV studio are: the AVB Ethernet network, the management software and its set of protocols, and the synchronization mechanism to GenLock the A/V equipment. ó IP-Studio-Link is a reconfigurable platform used as a bridge between the traditional audio/video equipment and the AVB Ethernet network.