Layered Depth Panoramas

Ke Colin Zheng1     Sing Bing Kang2     Michael Cohen2     Richard Szeliski2    

1University of Washington     2Microsoft Research    

Abstract

Representations for interactive photorealistic visualization of scenes range from compact 2D panoramas to data-intensive 4D light fields. In this paper, we propose a technique for creating a layered representation from a sparse set of images taken with a hand-held camera. This representation, which we call a layered depth panorama (LDP), allows the user to experience 3D by off-axis panning. It combines the compelling experience of panoramas with limited 3D navigation. Our choice of representation is motivated by ease of capture and compactness. We formulate the problem of constructing the LDP as the recovery of color and geometry in a multi-perspective cylindrical disparity space. We leverage a graph cut approach to sequentially determine the disparity and color of each layer using multi-view stereo. Geometry visible through the cracks at depth discontinuities in a frontmost layer is determined and assigned to layers behind the frontmost layer. All layers are then used to render novel panoramic views with parallax. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of complex outdoor and indoor scenes.

Citation

Ke Colin Zheng, Sing Bing Kang, Michael Cohen, and Richard Szeliski. Layered Depth Panoramas. Proceedings of CVPR, 2007.

Paper

CVPR 2007 pre-print (4MB PDF)

More Results

Click images on the top to view the results step by step. For each example, we show the input sequence, a 2D visualization of the scene and the camera setup, and the depth map and the texture map for each layer of LDP. All the intermediate results can be viewed at its full resolutioin by clicking them. Note we use two different parameterizations to represent the 3D space: either from a single camera sitting at the center of the cylinder, or from cameras along the circular arc. We demonstrates our technique using both representations. With LDP, we now can pan the camera around, move from side to side, go forward and backward, zoom in and out, and perceive certain amount of parallax. Videos are provided to demonstrate such viewing experience. Just click the "viewing experience" links in the page to enjoy!