Image warping for compressing and spatially organizing a dense collection of images

Image-based rendering (IBR) systems create photorealistic views of complex 3D environments by resampling large collections of images captured in the environment. The quality of the resampled images increases significantly with image capture density. Thus, a significant challenge in interactive IBR systems is to provide both fast image access along arbitrary viewpoint paths and efficient storage of large image data sets. We describe a spatial image hierarchy combined with an image compression scheme that meets the requirements of interactive IBR walkthroughs. By using image warping and exploiting image coherence over the image capture plane, we achieve compression performance similar to traditional motioncompensated schema, e.g., MPEG, yet allow image access along arbitrary paths. Furthermore, by exploiting graphics hardware for image resampling, we can achieve interactive rates during IBR walkthroughs.