Multi-view Image-Based Rendering and Modeling

ii Acknowledgements I first would like to thank Prof. Gérard Medioni for being an absolutely wonderful thesis supervisor through the entire process. He started me out with great ideas and problems, provided good feedback and suggestions during the research, and made sure that the final output is of high quality. As well as teaching me computer vision, he showed me that good research can be fun. I thank him for making my time at USC a very rewarding experience. which ultimately makes my research possible, academically and financially. I am grateful to Prof. Proskurowski for clarifying some of the issues in numerical optimization. Thanks also to Prof. Ram Nevatia for his interest in my research and many casual discussions conducted in the IRIS hallway. I received help from several other members of the IRIS group and the CGIT group during various stages of this work. In particular, thanks to Alexandre Francois for being my lab mate during the years and answering questions whenever I have one; to Reyes Enciso for the valuable discussions about stereo and, especially, face reconstruction. I deeply appreciate my wife and my lovely daughter for patiently supporting me throughout this long academic journey. Thanks also to my parents and the rest of my family who are all excited about "one of them" getting a doctorate.