Gauthier Lafruit

Gauthier Lafruit
Brussels School of Engineering of the Université Libre de Bruxelles

From MPEG immersive video to holography

Wednesday, October 21st, 10:30 AM — 12:00 PM (GMT-3)

Abstract

In this talk, we will give an overview of the technologies that have been developed in the context of MPEG Immersive Media, supporting free navigation and virtual reality applications. Point Clouds and Immersive Video – aka Depth Image-Based Rendering – will be presented with the aim to expose commonalities and subtle differences that make them more appropriate to one or the other application. We will demonstrate how we can magically create any viewpoint to the scene (cf. my picture above) from only a limited number of fixed camera viewpoints (cf. http://rvs.science.ovh/) and how MPEG has handled the compression challenges. Finally, we will show preliminary results w.r.t. the development of a holographic head mounted display with “MPEG technology inside”.

Biography

Gauthier Lafruit is Associate Professor in Virtual Reality and Light Field technologies at l’Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), the French wing of Brussels University. He received his Master and Ph.D. degree in electromechanical engineering from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), which is the Flemish wing of Brussels University. He has worked for 25 years in the domain of visual data analysis and compression, participating to compression standardization committees like CCSDS (space applications), JPEG (still picture coding) and MPEG (moving picture coding). In 2014, he joined the LISA department of ULB – Laboratory of Image Synthesis and Analysis – where he is now associate professor in light field technologies and virtual reality. In 2018, his team actively contributed to part of the MPEG reference software for immersive experiences that will eventually be promoted by mid-2021 to the MIV standard: “MPEG Immersive Video”. Prof. Lafruit has also taken up the organization of the MPEG 129th meeting in Brussels, January 2020. Before that, he acted as co-chair in the MPEG-FTV (Free viewpoint TV) working group, and the Light Field Immersive Media Joint Ad-hoc Group between the MPEG and JPEG standardization committees.

Since June 2020, Prof. Lafruit is leading the European project HoviTron in the domain of interactive technologies, prototyping a holographic head mounted display, which uses software tools partly developed within MPEG.