The Wavelet Stream: Interactive Multi Resolution Light Field Rendering

Abstract

One of the most general image based object representations is the Light Field. Unfortunately, a large amount of data is required to reconstruct high quality views from a Light Field. In this paper, we present the wavelet stream which employs non-standard four-dimensional wavelet decomposition for Light Field compression. It allows for progressive transmission, storage, and rendering of compressed Light Field data. Our results show that 0.8% of the original coefficients or 0.3 bits per pixel, respectively are sufficient to obtain visually pleasing new views. Additionally, the wavelet stream allows for an adaptive multi-resolution representation of the Light Field data. Furthermore, a silhouette-encoding scheme helps to reduce the number of coefficients required. Our data structure allows to store arbitrary vector-valued data like RGB- or YUV-data. The Light Field data stored in the wavelet stream can be decompressed in real time for interactive rendering. For this, the reconstruction algorithm uses supplementary caching schemes.