Convenient reconstruction of natural plants by images

Convenient reconstruction of natural plants is a difficult task because of their intrinsic complex geometry. In this paper, we propose a convenient image-based approach to modeling and rendering large-leaf plants by view synthesis based on an approximate geometric model. The model we adopt consists of a set of billboard clusters, obtained by automatically decomposing a volume based on the flat property of leaves and assigning billboards corresponding to all input image viewpoints for each cluster. The volume is recovered from a set of images. In the final rendering procedure, a view-dependent billboard in each cluster is generated by interpolating already constructed ones. The whole process can be finished in half an hour and requires no user intervention.