Hardware-Accelerated Geometry Instancing for Surfel and Voxel Rendering of Scanned 4D Media

Range scanners based on camera-projector setups permit capturing dynamic objects at high frame rates at affordable costs, producing a time-varying set of points. This paper establishes a 4D media framework for acquiring, compressing and displaying these point clouds, albeit with more emphasis on the rendering aspects. Displaying these point clouds requires techniques capable of alleviating irregularities that are inherent in these low cost high-speed scanners. One of the contributions of this paper is a simple, general surfel splatting method that mitigates these imperfections. Rendering must also react quickly to the volatility of the 4D media dataset and cope with reasonably large quantities of points. To that end, this paper exploits modern features of the graphics hardware, namely geometry amplification and instancing, for efficient streaming and displaying of point clouds as either surfel or voxel primitives. A comparative performance analysis of the investigated strategies is also available.