Free-Viewpoint Navigation of Indoor Scene with 360° Field of View

Abstract

By providing a 360° field of view, spherical panoramas can convey vivid visual impressions. Thus, they are widely used in virtual reality systems and street view services. However, due to bandwidth or storage limitations, existing systems only provide sparsely captured panoramas and have limited interaction modes. Although there are methods that can synthesize novel views based on captured panoramas, the generated novel views all lie on the lines connecting existing views. Therefore these methods do not support free-viewpoint navigation. In this paper, we propose a new panoramic image-based rendering method for novel view generation. Our method represents each input panorama with a set of spherical superpixels and warps each superpixel individually so the method can deal with the occlusion and disocclusion problem. The warping is dominated by a two-term constraint, which can preserve the shape of the superpixel and ensure it is warped to the correct position determined by the 3D reconstruction of the scene. Our method can generate novel views that are far from input camera positions. Thus, it supports freely exploring the scene with a 360° field of view. We compare our method with three previous methods on datasets captured by ourselves and by others. Experiments show that our method can obtain better results.