US 7,126,603 B2 · Method and system for creating interactive walkthroughs of real-world environment from set of densely captured images

Abstract

Techniques for creating interactive walkthroughs or visualizations of real-world environments. Such environments for which interactive walkthroughs may be created may comprise large interior spaces (e.g., buildings), wherein a space may comprise multiple rooms. The interactive walkthroughs may be photorealistic and rendered from arbitrary viewpoints at interactive rates. In one aspect of the invention, a technique for generating a visualization representative of an environment comprises the following steps. A dense set of image data is captured from the environment. The captured image data is compressed for storage. A portion of the compressed image data may then be decompressed so as to render a visualization representative of the environment from a selected novel viewpoint. Another portion of the image data may be prefetched and decompressed such that captured image data surrounding the selected novel viewpoint is available to be rendered. The visualization of the environment may then be rendered from the selected novel viewpoint.

Claims18

Dependent claims

A method of generating at least one visualization representative of a real-world environment, comprising the steps of:

capturing a dense set of image data from the real-world environment;
compressing the captured image data for storage, wherein the image data compressing step further comprises creating a spatial hierarchy;
decompressing a portion of the compressed image data such that a visualization representative of the real-world environment may be rendered from a selected novel viewpoint;
prefetching and decompressing another portion of the image data such that captured image data surrounding the selected novel viewpoint is available to render the visualization from the selected novel viewpoint;
and
rendering the visualization of the real-world environment from the selected novel viewpoint;
wherein the image data compressing step further comprises compressing images by building a tree via edge collapse operations of a triangulation of the image centers-of-projection and calculating residual images and reference images.

4 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Method and system for creating interactive walkthroughs of real-world environment from set of densely captured images

Life of this patent

Method and system for creating interactive walkthroughs of real-world environment from set of densely captured images

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims18