Building a photo-realistic virtual world using view-dependent images and models

Describes a new approach for building a photorealistic virtual world based on the real world. Using an image capturing system mounted on a vehicle, we have assembled a vast image database with global position and orientation information. However, if we store all the images taken from various users´ viewpoints, we might exhaust the resources. Thus, it is important to generate novel images from finite image data sets. For this purpose, we believe that a view-dependent “subjective” virtual space is sufficient, and an “objective” virtual space is not imperative. Based on this concept, we propose a view-dependent image projection method and a 3D layer presumption method to generate a subjective virtual space. By using these methods, we succeeded in constructing a photorealistic virtual world. Both methods yield only a local model of the entire virtual world. However, by changing the local models according to the user´s viewpoint, the user can move around a wider area. In this paper, we demonstrate that this kind of subjective model is practical and sufficient to construct a wide photorealistic virtual world