Experimental system of free viewpoint television

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed a new realtime dynamic ray data acquisition and rendering system named the “Free Viewpoint Television” or “FTV”. With this system, the user can freely control the viewpoint position of any dynamic real-world scene in realtime. The basic idea of this system is based on the ray-space method in which an arbitrary photo-realistic view can be generated from a collection of real view images. Since the system is aimed for realtime operation, the collection of images is obtained through an array of cameras where the generation of the missing ray information can be obtained by interpolation of data between cameras. The prototype system used here includes 16 CCD cameras forming a camera array. The interpolation is based on the adaptive filtering ray-space data interpolation technique. Between each pair of cameras, up to 15 interpolated views can be generated to ensure that no aliasing occurs. The system fully operates under consumer-class hardware. The results achieved from the system are good in terms of both image quality and rendering speed.