A/Professor Mark Pickering

Real-time 3D Video Communications for Tele-Health Applications

Abstract

The demand for quality healthcare continues to grow, especially in regional Australia, where access to medical specialists remains a concern. Conventional 2D videoconferencing based telemedicine systems have been widely explored in the past to support remote healthcare, but they are limited in their capabilities to provide a satisfactory communication experience due to low picture quality and non-guaranteed quality of service. Coupled with recent standardization efforts in video compression, high-definition 3D video communication is now feasible. The shared sense of presence enabled by 3D video technology is superior to its 2D counterpart, substantially improving communication quality and trust between geographically-separated patients and doctors by creating a higher level of realism. In this presentation I will summarize recent technological advances that make real-time 3D video communications an exciting possibility for future tele-health applications.

Biography

Mark Pickering is an Associate Professor with the School of Engineering and Information Technology, The University of New South Wales, at the Australian Defence Force Academy. His main research interests are: medical image acquisition and processing, video coding and video watermarking. He has co-authored 2 books, 39 journal articles and over 100 international conference papers in these and related fields.