Real-time arbitrary view interpolation and rendering system using ray-space
Norishige Fukushima, Tomohiro Yendo, Toshiaki Fujii, Masayuki Tanimoto · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2005
We propose a 3D live video system that generates arbitrary viewpoints in real-time based on the ray-space, one of the image-based rendering. With this system, a remote user can freely change the viewpoint, not only according to the captured camera position, but also can synthesize views where a camera is not physical present using the ray-space interpolation. The basic idea of ray-space rendering is collecting and rearranging the partition of simultaneously captured images according to an arbitrarily specified virtual-view. If hundreds of cameras were arranged in significant density, synthesizing a free viewpoint away from the camera baseline require only camera geometric information. Since we cannot obtain such full information of ray according to plenoptic sampling, arbitrarily view generation necessitate interpolation of slightly missed rays. However, such view interpolation's cost is particularly huge. Therefore, we introduce three novel techniques of view interpolation: first, view centered interpolation framework, second, estimating disparity with smoothing, third, hierarchical searching of correspondences for fast computation. Moreover, we implement the experimental system with those algorithms. This free-view generating system includes sixteen cameras arranged straightforward. All cameras are connected with the consumer computers one by one. Whole the computers connect a server computer via Ethernet categorized star network. This system carries out four processes in real time: capture images, correct position of cameras with projective transformation, interpolate images on baseline, rendering arbitrary viewpoint. The experimental result shows that this system is rendering arbitrary viewpoint at 12fps (frames per second) set image resolution set to 320x240. We succeeded in synthesizing highly photo-realistic images.