Virtual Reality Using the Concentric Mosaic: Construction, Rendering and Data Compression

This paper proposes a new image based rendering technique called concentric mosaic for virtual reality applications. It is constructed by capturing vertical slit images when a camera is moving around a set of concentric circles. Concentric mosaic allows the user to move freely in a circular region and observe significant parallax and lighting changes without recovering the geometric and photometric scene model. The rendering of concentric mosaic is very efficient, which amounts to reordering and interpolating of previously captured slit images in the concentric mosaic. Concentric mosaic typically consists of hundreds of high-resolution images, which consumes significant amount of storage and bandwidth for transmission. A MPEG-like compression algorithm is therefore proposed in this paper taking advantages of the access patterns and redundancies of the mosaic images. Experimental results show that real-time reconstruction of novel views with good image quality can be achieved in a Pentium II 300 MHz PC.