Capturing, processing, and rendering real-world scenes
Lars S. Nyland, Anselmo Lastra, David McAllister, Voicu S. Popescu, Chris McCue, Henry Fuchs · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2000
While photographs vividly capture a scene from a single viewpoint, it is our goal to capture a scene in such a way that a viewer can freely move to any viewpoint, just as he or she would in an actual scene. We have built a prototype system to quickly digitize a scene using a laser rangefinder and a high-resolution digital camera that accurately captures a panorama of high-resolution range and color information. With real-world scenes, we have provided data to fuel research in many area, including representation, registration, data fusion, polygonization, rendering, simplification, and reillumination. The real-world scene data can be used for many purposes, including immersive environments, immersive training, re-engineering and engineering verification, renovation, crime-scene and accident capture and reconstruction, archaeology and historic preservation, sports and entertainment, surveillance, remote tourism and remote sales. We will describe our acquisition system, the necessary processing to merge data from the multiple input devices and positions. We will also describe high quality rendering using the data we have collected. Issues about specific rendering accelerators and algorithms will also be presented. We will conclude by describing future uses and methods of collection for real- world scene data.