Light Field Rendering of Dynamic Scene

Image based rendering has displayed advantage in speed over traditional geometry based rendering algorithms. With the four dimensional light field descriptions, static scene can be generated with interactive rate on ordinary computer. The limitation of the scheme is that it can only handle static scene and fixed illumination. This paper raises the idea to decompose the light field into sub-light-fields that do not change as scene changes. It expands the advantage of light field rendering to dynamic scenes where the position and orientation of objects, lights and viewpoint can be modified arbitrarily. The sub-light-fields include: ambient light field and spot light field. The latter is actually an eightdimensional space. Because diffuse reflection is independent on view direction, this paper presents a fourdimensional representation of spot light field. Considering the linearity of diffuse reflection to different spot lights, the spot light fields of an object can be represented by the reflection light field to a pure-color light with unit intensity, to decrease storage and preprocessing. Owing to the coherency in their data structures, data of the corresponding point in the ambient light field, diffuse light field and depth field are combined into a 5dimensional vector which can be compressed efficiently with vector quantization. The algorithm given in this paper accurately computes typical characteristics of dynamic scene such as changes in surface color and shadow.