Point-sampled 3D video of real-world scenes

This paper presents a point-sampled approach for capturing 3D video footage and subsequent re-rendering of real-world scenes. The acquisition system is composed of multiple sparsely placed 3D video bricks. The bricks contain a low-cost projector, two grayscale cameras and a high-resolution color camera. To improve on depth calculation we rely on structured light patterns. Texture images and pattern-augmented views of the scene are acquired simultaneously by time multiplexed projections of complementary patterns and synchronized camera exposures. High-resolution depth maps are extracted using depth-from-stereo algorithms performed on the acquired pattern images. The surface samples corresponding to the depth values are merged into a view-independent, point-based 3D data structure. This representation allows for efficient post-processing algorithms and leads to a high resulting rendering quality using enhanced probabilistic EWA volume splatting. In this paper, we focus on the 3D video acquisition system and necessary image and video processing techniques. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.