Real-Time Camera Walks Using Light Fields

Abstract

An interesting alternative to traditional geometry based rendering isLight Field Rendering {[}1,2]. A camera gantry is used to acquireauthentic imagery and detailed novel views are synthetically generatedfrom unknown viewpoints. The drawback is the significant data on disk.Moving from static images, a walkthrough or a camera walk through theimplied virtual world is often desirable but the repeated access of thelarge data makes the task increasingly difficult. We note that althoughpotentially infinite walkthroughs are possible, for any given path, onlya subset of the previously stored light field is required. Our priorwork {[}3] exploited this and reduced the main memory requirement.However, considerable computational burden is encountered in processingeven this reduced subset. This negatively impacts real-time rendering.In this paper, we subdivide the image projection plane into ``cells,{''}each of which gets all its radiance information from the cached portionsof the light field at select ``nodal points.{''} Once these cells aredefined, the cache is visited systematically to find the radianceefficiently. The net result is real-time camera walks.