Rendering with Concentric Mosaics
This paper presents a novel 3D plenoptic function, which we call concentric mosaics. We constrain camera motion to planar concentric circles, and create concentric mosaics using a manifold mosaic for each circle (i.e., composing slit images taken at different loca-tions). Concentric mosaics index all input image rays naturally in 3 parameters: radius, rotation angle and vertical elevation. Novel views are rendered by combining the appropriate captured rays in an efficient manner at rendering time. Although vertical distortions exist in the rendered images, they can be alleviated by depth correction. Like panoramas, concentric mosaics do not require recovering geometric and photometric scene models. Moreover, concentric mosaics provide a much richer user experience by allowing the user to move freely in a circular region and observe significant parallax and lighting changes. Compared with a Lightfield or Lumigraph, concentric mosaics have much smaller file size because only a 3D plenoptic function is constructed. Concentric mosaics have good space and computational efficiency, and are very easy to capture. This paper discusses a complete working system from capturing, construction, compression, to rendering of concentric mosaics from synthetic and real environments.
Copyright © 1999 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library -http://www.acm.org/dl/.