Arbitrary view generation for three-dimensional scenes from uncalibrated video cameras

This paper focuses on the representation and arbitrary view generation of three dimensional (3-D) scenes. In contrast to existing methods that construct a full 3-D model or those that exploit geometric invariants, our representation consists of dense depth maps at several preselected viewpoints from an image sequence. Furthermore, instead of using multiple calibrated stationary cameras or range data, we derive our depth maps from image sequences captured by an uncalibrated camera. We propose an adaptive matching algorithm which assigns various confidence levels to different regions. Nonuniform bicubic spline interpolation is then used to fill in low confidence regions in the depth maps. Once the depth maps are computed at preselected viewpoints, the intensity and depth at these locations are used to reconstruct arbitrary views of the 3-D scene. Experimental results are presented to verify our approach