Expanding Possible View Points of Virtual Environment Using Panoramic Images

This paper presents a new method for creating a 3D virtual broad city environment with walk-through systems based on Image-Based Rendering(IBR). In that virtual city, people can move rather freely and look at arbitrary views. The strength of our method is that we are able to easily render any view from an arbitrary point to an arbitrary direction on the ground in a virtual environment; previous methods, on the other hand, have strong restraints concerning their re-constructable areas. One of the other applications of our method is a driving simulator in the ITS domain. We can generate any view on any lane on the road from images taken by running along just one lane. Our method first captures panoramic images running along a straight line, indexing the capturing position of each image. The rendering process consists of selecting some suitable slits divided vertically from stored images, and reassembling them to create an image from a novel observation point.