Virtual Video Camera: Image-Based Viewpoint Navigation Through Space and Time

We present an image-based rendering system to viewpoint-navigate through space and time of complex real-world, dynamic scenes. Our approach accepts unsynchronized, uncalibrated multi-video footage as input. Inexpensive, consumer-grade camcorders suffice to acquire arbitrary scenes, e.g., in the outdoors, without elaborate recording setup procedures, allowing also for hand-held recordings. Instead of scene depth estimation, layer segmentation, or 3D reconstruction, our approach is based on dense image correspondences, treating view interpolation uniformly in space and time: spatial viewpoint navigation, slow motion, or freeze-and-rotate effects can all be created in the same way. Acquisition simplification, integration of moving cameras, generalization to difficult scenes, and space-time symmetric interpolation amount to a widely applicable Virtual Video Camera system. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation--I.3.8A...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CGF
• Authors: Christian Lipski, Christian Linz, Kai Berger, Anita Sellent, Marcus A. Magnor
• Keywords: CGF 2010, Computational Geometry, Elaborate Recording Setup, Space-time Symmetric Interpolation, Uncalibrated Multi-video Footage