Real-time camera walks using light fields

An interesting alternative to traditional geometry based rendering is Light Field Rendering [1,2]. A camera gantry is used to acquire authentic imagery and detailed novel views are synthetically generated from unknown viewpoints. The drawback is the significant data on disk. Moving from static images, a walkthrough or a camera walk through the implied virtual world is often desirable but the repeated access of the large data makes the task increasingly difficult. We note that although potentially infinite walkthroughs are possible, for any given path, only a subset of the previously stored light field is required. Our prior work [3] exploited this and reduced the main memory requirement. However, considerable computational burden is encountered in processing even this reduced subset. This negatively impacts real-time rendering. In this paper, we subdivide the image projection plane into "cells," each of which gets all its radiance information from the cached portions of the light field at select "nodal points." Once these cells are defined, the cache is visited systematically to find the radiance efficiently. The net result is real-time camera walks