Image-based construction of 3D virtual environments from a sequence of omnidirectional images

Presents a new method for constructing a virtual environment from a real-world scene, in which users can look around the scene with binocular stereoscopic sensation. The approach is based on generating novel views at arbitrary positions from a sequence of omnidirectional images in real time. A sequence of omnidirectional images is captured by a moving an omnidirectional video camera with a known velocity in a static real environment. In the proposed method, a fixed length of image sequence is temporarily buffered to generate arbitrarily directional binocular stereo images combining captured rays. Telepresence systems have been developed for showing the feasibility of the method, assuming the omnidirectional camera to be running along a straight line with a constant speed. Experiments have shown that a user can look around a remote scene in the distance from moving viewpoints with rich 3D sensation without any significant time delay.