A Free-Viewpoint Video Renderer

Free-viewpoint video allows interactive control of the camera viewpoint in video playback using a three-dimensional (3D) scene representation. This paper describes the challenges and the state-of-the-art techniques adopted in developing a free-viewpoint renderer for 3D video production of people. The system requires video streams from a set of fixed or dynamic real-world video cameras and synthesizes arbitrary viewpoints on the GPU using a dynamic 3D scene model. We have released the renderer as an open source application for the research community (see the web information at the end of this paper). The renderer provides (i) the facility to simulate camera viewpoints from publicly available multiple-view video datasets and (ii) a baseline technique for free-viewpoint video synthesis in the development of interactive 3D video and 3DTV applications.