Feature-based surface light field morphing

Abstract

A surface light field is a function that gives the colors of each object point viewed from different directions. Object representation with a surface light field provides a nice structure for 3D photography. This paper presents a feature-based morphing technique for two objects equipped with surface light fields. The technique consists of geometry morphing and in-between light field mapping. Geometry morphing is accomplished by 3D mesh morphing, where we introduce a vertex merging technique to generate a simpler metamesh. In in-between light field mapping, an in-between object is rendered by extracting necessary fragments from input surface light fields. We also propose an acceleration technique for rendering an in-between object. Experimental results with real and synthetic data show natural and plausible morphing between objects with surface light fields. The proposed morphing technique can be used as an editing tool for 3D photography.