Free Viewpoint Image Generation Research Articles

Free viewpoint image generation system using fisheye cameras and a laser rangefinder for indoor robot teleoperation

In robot teleoperation, a lack of depth information often results in collisions between the robots and obstacles in its path or surroundings. To address this issue, free viewpoint images can greatly benefit the operators in terms of collision avoidance as the operators are able to view the robot’s surrounding from the images at arbitrary points, giving them a better depth information. In this paper, a novel free viewpoint image generation system is proposed. One approach to generate free viewpoint images is to use multiple cameras and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). Instead of using the expensive LiDAR, this study utilizes a cost-effective laser rangefinder (LRF) and a characteristic of man-made environments. In other words, we install multiple fisheye cameras and an LRF on a robot. Free viewpoint images are generated under the assumption that walls are perpendicular to the floor. Furthermore, an easy calibration for estimating the poses of the multiple fisheye cameras, the LRF, and the robot model is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed method can generate free viewpoint images using cameras and an LRF. Finally, the proposed method is primarily implemented using OpenGL Shading Language to utilize a graphics processing unit computation to achieve a real-time processing of the multiple high-resolution images. Supplementary videos and our source code are available at our project page (https://matsuren.github.io/fvp).

Paper] Free-viewpoint Mobile Robot Teleoperation Interface Using View-dependent Geometry and Texture

This paper proposes a free-viewpoint interface for mobile-robot teleoperation, which provides viewpoints that are freely congurable by the human operator head pose. The viewpoints are acquired by a head tracker equipped on a head mounted display. A real-time free-viewpoint image generation method based on view-dependent geometry and texture is employed by the interface to synthesize the scene presented to the operator. In addition, a computer graphics model of the robot is superimposed on the free-viewpoint images using an augmented reality technique. We developed a prototype system based on the proposed interface using an omnidirectional camera and depth cameras for experiments. The experiments under both virtual and physical environments demonstrated that the proposed interface can improve the accuracy of the robot operation compared with rst- and third-person view interfaces, while the quality of the free-viewpoint images generated by the prototype system was satisfactory for expressing the potential advantages on operational accuracy.

8-4 移動カメラアレイを用いた動的シーンの自由視点画像生成(第8部門 多視点映像)

8-4 移動カメラアレイを用いた動的シーンの自由視点画像生成(第8部門 多視点映像)