Definition and construction of a 3D compact representation of image sequences

This paper tackles the 3D model-based representation of video sequences of real scenes and focuses on sequences derived from a camera moving in static scenes. 3D models can be used advantageously for compression purposes. Moreover, they are quite adapted to interactive viewpoint synthesis. The objective is here to build a compact 3D-based representation of a given video sequence. It first requires establishing correspondence between images from which viewpoint parameters and depth maps are estimated. The representation is then built by selecting in the image sequence the data that are necessary and sufficient to reconstruct the sequence at a given quality level. This paper presents this second part of the system. Our representation is a structured view-dependent 3D model composed of an ordered set of rectangular patches describing 2.5D regions (flag+texture+depth for each pixel) with attached viewpoint parameters sets.