Real-time, Free-viewpoint Video Rendering from Volumetric Geometry

The aim of this work is to render high-quality views of a dynamic scene from novel viewpoints in real-time. An online system available at our institute computes the visual hull as a geometry proxy to guide the rendering at interactive rates. Because only a sparse set of cameras distributed around the scene is used to record the scene, only an coarse model of the scene geometry can be recovered. To alleviate this problem, we render textured billboards defined by the voxel model of the visual hull, preserving details in the source images while achieving excellent performance. By exploiting multi-texturing capabilities of modern graphics hardware, real-time frame rates are attained. Our algorithm can be used as part of an inexpensive system to display 3D-videos, or ultimately even in live 3D-television. The user is able to watch the scene from an arbitrary viewpoint chosen interactively