Imaging and Rendering Framework for Photorealistic Mixed-Reality World Exploration
Fumio Ohkura · NAIST Digital Library (Nara Institute of Science and Technology) · 2014
The exploration of the real world in a virtual simulation has become one of the most important applications of augmented virtuality (AV) in accordance with the popularization of virtual globe applications (e.g., Google Earth), where AV is one aspect of mixed reality (MR) research fields according to the realityvirtuality continuum.A large-scale physical environment can be virtualized using modern three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction techniques, such as vision-based and multi-sensor integration approaches.Image-based rendering provides promising improvements to the appearance of automatically reconstructed 3D models, which usually include errors in 3D shape.In certain applications that allow an interactive virtual exploration of the real world, virtual objects can be superimposed for the visualization of disaster areas or non-existent buildings.In such applications, the virtual objects have to be rendered frame by frame.Real-time rendering approaches have been studied for photometric registration between real and virtual objects in augmented reality (AR), and have become one of the most important research fields in the area of MR.The goal of these researches is to achieve the same quality as offline rendering, but this has not been achieved yet.This study proposes a framework for acquiring real-world scenes, and rendering both the real and virtual worlds for photorealistic MR-world exploration.