On the Use of Ray-tracing for Viewpoint Interpolation in Panoramic Imagery

To acquire seamless visualization of environments from different viewing positions and orientations, it is desirable to generate virtual images for an arbitrary position given a set of reference views. In this paper, a simple interpolation method based on ray-tracing is proposed for viewpoint synthesis from panoramas taken with multi-sensor cameras. Instead of attempting to recover a dense 3D reconstruction of the scene, the method estimates the pose between each panorama and then backward projects the point along the ray that exhibits the best colour consistency. We show that by limiting the search space using sparse depth information, both the speed and the accuracy of the interpolation are improved.