IMAGE-BASED RENDERING: A NEW RENDERING PARADIGM

Abstract- In the pursuit of photo-realism in conventional polygon-based computer graphics, models have become so complex that most of the polygons are smaller than one pixel in the final image. At the same time, graphics hardware systems at the very high end are becoming capable of rendering, at interactive rates, nearly as many triangles per frame as there are pixels on the screen. Formerly, when models were simple and the triangle primitives were large, the ability to specify large, connected regions with only three points was a considerable efficiency in storage and computation. Now that models contain nearly as many primitives as pixels in the final image, we should rethink the use of geometric primitives to describe complex environments. An alternative approach is to represent the complex 3D environments with sets of images. These images include information describing the depth of each pixel along with the color and other properties. Algorithms can be developed for processing these depth-enhanced images to produce new images from viewpoints that were not included in the original image set. Thus, using a finite set of source images, we can produce new images from arbitrary viewpoints. This paper explains the approach of image-based rendering and compares it with other existing rendering techniques