Capturing, Processing and Rendering Real- World Scenes

While photographs vividly capture a scene from a single viewpoint, it is our goal to capture a scene in such a way that a viewer can freely move to any viewpoint, just as he or she would in an actual scene. We have built a prototype system to quickly digitize a scene using a laser rangefinder and a high-resolution digital camera that accurately captures a panorama of high-resolution range and color information. With real-world scenes, we have provided data to fuel research in many areas, including representation, registration, data fusion, polygonization, rendering, simplification, and reillumination. The real-world scene data can be used for many purposes, including immersive environments, immersive training, reengineering and engineering verification, renovation, crime-scene and accident capture and reconstruction, archaeology and historic preservation, sports and entertainment, surveillance, remote tourism and remote sales. We will describe our acquisition system, the necessary processing to merge data from the multiple input devices and positions. We will also describe (and show) high quality rendering using the data we have collected. Issues about specific rendering accelerators and algorithms will also be presented. We will conclude by describing future uses and methods of collection for real-world scene data. Figure 1. Examples of our data. The scene is Thomas Jefferson's library at Monticello, VA. The top image is a range map, where lighter is further (black is no data), the center image is the reflected laser light image, and the bottom image is the color panorama taken from the same point.