VideoPlus: a method for capturing the structure and appearance of immersive environments

This paper presents a simple approach to capturing the appearance and structure of immersive scenes based on the imagery acquired with an omnidirectional video camera. The scheme proceeds by combining techniques from structure-from-motion with ideas from image-based rendering. An interactive photogrammetric modeling scheme is used to recover the locations of a set of salient features in the scene (points and lines) from image measurements in a small set of keyframe images. The estimates obtained from this process are then used as a basis for estimating the position and orientation of the camera at every frame in the video clip. By augmenting the video sequence with pose information, we provide the end-user with the ability to index the video sequence spatially as opposed to temporally. This allows the user to explore the immersive scene by interactively selecting the desired viewpoint and viewing direction.