Capturing the shape of a dynamic world - fast!

Acquiring online the evolving shape of a dynamic scene from a handful of video streams may be considered one of the most challenging, but at the same time also most auspicious tasks in contemporary computer graphics and computer vision research. The anticipation of revolutionary new applications such as interactive 3D television broadcasts motivates the ongoing work on free-viewpoint video rendering. The paper aims at giving a state-of-progress report on this lively research endeavor. Different acquisition setups and online reconstruction approaches are exemplified. Yielding interactive frame rates, depth map-based techniques, polyhedral as well as volumetric visual hull reconstruction approaches, and combined methods employing visual hull-guided depth map estimation are presented. The experience gained with these approaches allows us to identify future research directions towards real-time analysis and high-quality synthesis of dynamic, real-world scenes.