Depth Image Representation for Image Based Rendering

Sashi Kumar Penta

Conventional approaches to render a scene require geometric description such as polygonal meshes, etc and appearance descriptions such as lights and material properties. To render high quality images from such descriptions, we require very accurate models and materials. Creating such accurate geometric models of real scenes is a difficult and time consuming problem. Image Based Rendering (IBR) holds a lot of promise for navigating through a real world scene without modeling it manually. Different representations have been proposed for IBR in the literature. In this thesis, we explore the Depth Image representation consisiting of depth maps and texture images from a number of viewpoints as a rich and viable representation for IBR.

We discuss various aspects of this Depth Image representation including its capture, representation, compression, and rendering. We present algorithms for efficient and smooth rendering of new views using the Depth Image representation. We show several examples of using the representation to model and render the complex scenes. We present a fast rendering algorithm using Depth Images on programmable GPUs. Compression of multiple images has attracted lot of attention in the past. Compression of multiple depth maps of the same scene has not been explored in the literature. We propose a method for compressing multiple depth maps in this paper using a geometric proxy. Different quality of rendering and compression ratios can be achieved by varying different parameters. Experiments show the effectiveness of the compression technique on several model data.

Related Publications

• Sashi Kumar Penta and P. J. Narayanan, - Compression of Multiple Depth-Maps for IBR, The Visual Computer, International Journal of Computer Graphics, Vol. 21, No.8-10, September 2005, pp. 611--618. [PDF]

• P. J. Narayanan, Sashi Kumar P and Sireesh Reddy K, Depth+Texture Representation for Image Based Rendering, Proceedings of the Indian Conference on Vision, Graphics and Image Processing(ICVGIP), Dec. 2004, Calcutta, India, pp. 113--118. [PDF]

• Pooja Verlani, Aditi Goswami, P. J. Narayanan, Shekhar Dwivedi and Sashi Kumar Penta - Depth Images: Representations and Real-time Rendering in Symposium on 3D Data Processing, Visualization and Transmission, June 14-16, 2006 (3DPVT 2006).

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