We present a new approach for modeling and rendering existing architectural scenes from a sparse set of still photographs. Our modeling approach, which combines both geometry-based and imagebased techniques, has two components. The first component is a photogrammetricmodeling methodwhich facilitates the recoveryof the basic geometry of the photographed scene. Our photogrammetric modeling approach is effective, convenient, and robust because it exploits the constraints that are characteristic of architectural scenes. The second component is a model-based stereo algorithm, which recovers how the real scene deviates from the basic model. By making use of the model, our stereo technique robustly recovers accurate depth from widely-spaced image pairs. Consequently,our approach can model large architectural environments with far fewer photographs than current image-based modeling approaches. For producing renderings, we present view-dependenttexture mapping, a method of compositing multiple...
Paul E. Debevec, Camillo J. Taylor, Jitendra Malik