A Stereoscopic Image-Based Approach to Virtual Environment Navigation

Image-Based Virtual Environments are alternative approaches for virtual reality applications to generate real world scenes in virtual environments with low computation cost. This paper presents an approach to creating interactive image-based virtual reality environments in stereoscopic modes using binocular stereoscopic omnidirectional image sequences. The Omnidirectional Binocular Stereoscopic images are generated from four images by using an omni-directional camera. All captured images are re-rendered to a stereoscopic image pair. The images are digitally warped to a cylindrical view-plane to minimize the distortion. The images are evaluated by using a stereo matching algorithm. After organizing the images by our implemented system, the user can interact (zoom or pan) with the scenes and freely control movement around a specific area by “hopping” from one position to another. A new technique, which is used to interpolate the image to smooth the hopping, is also proposed and evaluated. Keyword: Stereoscopic image, Virtual reality, Environment map, Omni-directional image, View interpolation.