Real-Time Generation and Presentation of View-Dependent Binocular Stereo Images Using a Sequence of Omnidirectional Images

This paper presents a new method to generate and present arbitrarily directional binocular stereo images from a sequence of omnidirectional images in real time. A sequence of omnidirectional images is taken by moving an omnidirectional image sensor in a static real environment. The motion of the omnidirectional image sensor is constrained to a plane. The sensor’s route and speed are known. In the proposed method, a fixed length of the sequence is buffered in a computer to generate arbitrarily directional binocular stereo images using a subset of plenoptic function. Using the method a user can look around a scene in the distance with rich 3-D sensation without significant time delay. This paper describes a principle of real-time generation of binocular stereo images. In addition, we introduce a prototype system of view-dependent stereo image generation and presentation.