Efficient View-Dependent Image-Based Rendering with Projective Texture-Mapping

This paper presents how the image-based rendering technique of viewdependent texture-mapping (VDTM) can be efficiently implemented using projective texture mapping, a feature commonly available in polygon graphics hardware. VDTM is a technique for generating novel views of a scene with approximately known geometry making maximal use of a sparse set of original views. The original presentation of VDTM in by Debevec, Taylor, and Malik required significant per-pixel computation and did not scale well with the number of original images. In our technique, we precompute for each polygon the set of original images in which it is visibile and create a “view map” data structure that encodes the best texture map to use for a regularly sampled set of possible viewing directions. To generate a novel view, the view map for each polygon is queried to determine a set of no more than three original images to blended together in order to render the polygon with projective texture-mapping. Invisible triangles are shaded using an object-space hole-filling method. We show how the rendering process can be streamlined for implementation on standard polygon graphics hardware. We present results of using the method to render a large-scale model of the Berkeley bell tower and its surrounding campus enironment.