Modeling and rendering of walkthrough environments with panoramic images

Abstract

An important, potential application of image-based techniques is to create photo-realistic image-based environments for interactive walkthrough. However, existing image-based studies are based on different assumptions with different focuses. There is a lack of a general framework or architecture for evaluation and development of a practical image-based system. In this paper, we propose an architecture to unify different image-based methods. Based on the architecture, we propose an image-based system to support interactive walkthrough of scalable environments. In particular, we introduce the concept of angular range, which is useful for designing a scalable configuration, recovering geometric proxy as well as rendering. We also propose a new method to recover geometry information even from outdoor scenes and a new rendering method to address the problem of abrupt visual changes in a scalable environment.

Virtual cubic panorama synthesis based on triangular reprojection

“…When a 3D geometric proxy can be reconstructed, the novel view can be generated by reprojecting the images onto the proxy and then blending. The geometric proxy is versatile, evolving from pixels or patches, even voxels . Because a dense sampling rate greatly increases the calibration effort for captured images, as well as the required storage capacity, which is especially aggravating for panoramas, it is important to explore suitable geometric proxies that could provide a reasonable tradeoff between keeping a good rendering quality and having a sparse sampling rate.…”

Intermediate cubic-panorama synthesis based on triangular re-projection

“…When a 3D geometric proxy can be reconstructed, the novel view can be generated by reprojecting the images onto the proxy and then blending. The geometric proxy is versatile, evolving from pixels or patches, even voxels [16][17][18]. Because a dense sampling rate greatly increases the calibration effort for captured images, as well as the required storage capacity, which is especially aggravating for panoramas, it is important to explore suitable geometric proxies that could provide a reasonable tradeoff between keeping a good rendering quality and having a sparse sampling rate.…”