Post-Rendering 3D Warping

William R. Mark, Leonard McMillan, Gary Bishop

Proceedings of 1997 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics (Providence, Rhode Island, April 27-30, 1997), pp. 7-16.

Abstract

A pair of rendered images and their Z-buffers contain almost all of the information necessary to re-render from nearby viewpoints. For the small changes in viewpoint that occur in a fraction of a second, this information is sufficient for high quality re-rendering with cost independent of scene complexity. Re-rendering from previously computed views allows an order-of-magnitude increase in apparent frame rate over that provided by conventional rendering alone. It can also compensate for system latency in local or remote display.

We use McMillan and Bishop's image warping algorithm to re-render, allowing us to compensate for viewpoint translation as well as rotation. We avoid occlusion-related artifacts by warping two different reference images and compositing the results. This paper explains the basic design of our system and provides details of our reconstruction and multi-image compositing algorithms. We present our method for selecting reference image locations and the heuristic we use for any portions of the scene which happen to be occluded in both reference images. We also discuss properties of our technique which make it suitable for real-time implementation, and briefly describe our simpler real-time remote display system.

Full Paper (except plates): PDF (0.3M), or compressed postscript (0.5M), or uncompressed postscript (5.0M)
Color Plate Page: Adobe PDF (0.6M), or compressed postscript (1.7M), or uncompressed postscript (3.7M)

Individual Color Plates:

Captions (B&W postscript)
Plate #1 (24-bit TIFF)
Plate #2 (24-bit TIFF)
Plate #3 (24-bit TIFF)
Plate #4 (24-bit TIFF)

[Note: The caption for Plate#3 in these downloadable files incorporates a correction for a minor typo that appeared in the published paper.]

Video Clips

Sequences #1-8 all follow the same path through the model, and were produced using our software test-bed and then MPEG encoded. They should be played back at 30 frames/sec.