Hardware Accelerated Light Field Rendering

Light field rendering has become one of the major topics in image based rendering. To extend the wide-spread use of these techniques it is crucial to have fast and efficient rendering algorithms. In this paper we will present methods for accelerating the display of traditional two-plane-parametrized light fields and lumigraphs. The proposed algorithms use standard graphics hardware. First we analyse the well-known approaches to light field rendering. Then we improve them by introducing techniques for faster geometry setup and texture handling. Additionally some extensions to the common rendering methods are described and finally we show some results by comparing the known approaches with our new techniques. CR Categories: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation—Digitizing and scanning, Viewing algorithms