Freely Explore the Scene with 360° Field of View

By providing 360° field of view, spherical panoramas are widely used in virtual reality (VR) systems and street view services. However, due to bandwidth or storage limitations, existing systems only provide sparsely captured panoramas and have limited interaction modes. Although there are methods that can synthesize novel views based on captured panoramas, the generated novel views all lie on the lines connecting existing views. Therefore these methods do not support free viewpoint navigation. In this paper, we propose a new panoramic image based rendering method. Our method takes pre-captured images as input and can synthesize panoramas at novel views that are far from input camera positions. Thus, it supports to freely explore the scene with 360° field of view.