Surface Camera Light Field Rendering

With: Leonard McMillan and Steven Gortler

Abstract

In this paper we present a new variant of the light field representation that supports improved image reconstruction by accommodating sparse correspondence information. This places our representation somewhere between a pure, two-plane parameterized, light field and a lumigraph representation, with its continuous geometric proxy. Our approach factors the rays of a light field into one of two separate classes. All rays consistent with a given correspondence are implicitly represented using a new auxiliary data structure, which we call a surface camera, or scam. The remaining rays of the light field are represented using a standard two-plane parameterized light field. We present an efficient rendering algorithm that combines ray samples from scams with those from the light field. The resulting image reconstructions are noticeably improved over that of a pure light field.

The full paper is published at Pacific Graphics 2002, (Beijing, China, October 9-11).

A journal version of the paper is published at IJIG and can be downloaded here.