Efficient rendering of light field images

Abstract

Recently a new display type has emerged that is able to display 50,000 views offering a full parallax autostereoscopic view of static scenes. With the advancement in the manufacturing technology, multi-view displays come with more and more views of dynamic content, closing the gap to this high quality full parallax display. The established method of content generation for synthetic stereo images is to render both views. To ensure a high quality these images are often ray traced. With the increasing number of views, rendering of all views is not feasible for multi-view displays. Therefore methods are required that can render the large amount of different views required by those displays efficiently. In the following a complete solution is presented that describes how all views for a full parallax display can be rendered from a small set of input images and their associated depth images with an image-based rendering algorithm. An acceleration of the rendering of two orders of magnitude is achieved by different parallelization techniques and the use of efficient data structures. Moreover, the problem of finding the best-next-view for an image-based rendering algorithm is addressed and a solution is presented that ranks possible viewpoints based on their suitability for an image-based rendering algorithm. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.