Image-based rendering of complex scenes from a multi-camera rig
Image-based rendering is a method to synthesise novel views from a set of given real images. Two methods to extrapolate novel views of complex scenes with occlusions and large depth discontinuities from images of a moving uncalibrated multi-camera rig are discribed. The real camera viewpoints are calibrated from the image data and dense depth maps are estimated for each real view. Novel views are synthesised from this representation with view-dependent image-based rendering techniques at interactive rates. Since the 3-D scene geometry is available in this approach, it is well suited for mixed reality applications where synthetic 3-D objects are seamlessly embedded in the novel view.