Toward interactive scene walkthroughs from images

Interactive walkthrough applications require rendering an observed scene from a continuous range of target viewpoints. Toward this end, a novel approach is introduced that processes a set of input images to produce photorealistic scene reprojections over a wide range of viewpoints. This is achieved by (1) acquiring calibrated input images that are distributed throughout a target range of viewpoints to be modeled, and (2) computing a 3D reconstruction that is consistent in projection with all of the input images. The method avoids image correspondence problems by working in a discretized scene space whose voxels are traversed in a fixed visibility ordering. This strategy takes full account of occlusions and enables reconstructions of panoramic scenes. Promising initial results are presented for a room walkthrough.