Rendering Real World Scenes and Objects for Virtual Environment Navigation

Abstract

In the first part of this paper, we describe a novel method of panoramic view rendering for real-time interactive application trying to present a real-world like environment. The proposed method is different from the approach of QuickTime VR, in that the scene is rendered by generating a sphere-like polyhedral environment map from photo-realistic images and using the generated maps to render the scene by techniques of computer graphics. In the second part, we purpose an image-based method for interactively observing a real-world object form arbitrary view point. Although come precision in alignment is lost, the high complexity, high quality and high frame rate performance on a Pentium PC without any hardware supported makes this approach attractive in low cost systems.