Arbitrary viewpoint rendering from multiple omnidirectional images for interactive walkthroughs

The interactive walkthrough which enables us to look around a virtualized real world has been widely investigated. The walkthrough system can be applied to simulation, telepresence, and so on. The paper describes a method of interactive walkthrough which takes a real scene and enables us to look around in the virtualized scene. Our method is based on acquiring omnidirectional images at multiple points in the real world by using an omnidirectional camera. The method generates an omnidirectional image at an arbitrary location from captured omnidirectional images, and presents a user a converted view-dependent perspective image. In the experiment, we realized the interactive walkthrough using indoor omnidirectional images and confirmed the feasibility of the method.