Selective Video Frame Cropping for Participant Visibility
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Solution Overview
Problem
Video conference systems face challenges in maintaining video quality as network bandwidth and compute resources are strained with increasing participant numbers, leading to reduced resolution and degraded meeting experiences.
Innovation Solution
A framing component selectively modifies video frames by identifying participants within a video frame and applying conditions to increase the ratio of participant pixels, enhancing video quality by cropping and enlarging the participant's view.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of energy
If video resolution is reduced to decrease bandwidth and compute resource usage, then network bandwidth consumption is reduced, but video quality deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies local quality enhancement by selectively modifying only the participant region of interest within the video frame, rather than processing the entire frame. The framing component identifies the participant's location and applies cropping and enlargement operations specifically to that region, maintaining high visual quality for participant features while keeping overall bandwidth consumption low.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transforms the video frame by changing its dimensional composition - cropping the frame to remove non-essential areas and enlarging the participant region. This dimensional transformation allows the same bandwidth to convey more meaningful visual information about the participant, effectively improving perceived video quality without increasing overall data transmission.
2Loss of energy
If video resolution is reduced to decrease bandwidth usage, then network bandwidth consumption is reduced, but participant visibility deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The framing component selectively enhances the participant region by cropping and enlarging it, ensuring that critical participant information (facial expressions, gestures) remains clearly visible even when overall video resolution is reduced. This local enhancement preserves participant visibility information while maintaining low bandwidth consumption.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts the participant region from the full video frame, isolating and enlarging only the relevant portion. This extraction process removes unnecessary background or peripheral elements, concentrating the visual information on the participant's face and upper body, thereby improving participant visibility without requiring increased bandwidth.
3Productivity
If compute resources are reduced to accommodate more participants, then system capacity increases, but video processing quality deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The framing component implements efficient compute resource usage by applying video processing operations only to the necessary participant region rather than the entire frame. This localized processing approach maintains high video processing quality for the participant area while consuming fewer compute resources, enabling the system to support more participants.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments the video frame into the participant region and the rest of the frame, applying processing operations only to the participant segment. This segmentation allows the system to maintain high processing quality for the important participant area while reducing overall compute resource requirements, thereby increasing system capacity.
Data Source
AI summary
An illustrative framing component of a video conference system identifies, from a plurality of pixels of a video frame, a subset of the pixels of the video frame that depict a participant of a video conference meeting in the video frame. The framing component determines whether the video frame satisfies a set of one or more modification conditions. The framing component modifies, based on the identifying the subset of the pixels and the video frame satisfying the set of one or more modification conditions, the video frame to increase a ratio of the subset of the pixels that depict the participant in the video frame to the plurality of pixels of the video frame. Corresponding methods and systems are also disclosed.