Item

Abstract

In free-viewpoint video, the viewer can interactively choose his
viewpoint in \mbox{3-D} space to observe the action of a dynamic
real-world scene from arbitrary perspectives.

The human body and its motion plays a central role in most visual media
and its structure can be exploited for robust motion estimation and efficient
visualization. This paper describes a system that uses multi-view
synchronized video footage of an actor's performance to
estimate motion parameters and to interactively re-render the
actor's appearance from any viewpoint.


The actor's silhouettes are extracted from
synchronized video frames via background
segmentation and then used to determine a sequence of poses
for a \mbox{3D} human body model.
By employing multi-view texturing during rendering, time-dependent changes
in the body surface are reproduced in high detail.
The motion capture subsystem runs offline, is non-intrusive, yields robust
motion parameter estimates, and can cope with a
broad range of motion.
The rendering subsystem runs at real-time frame rates using ubiquous
graphics hardware, yielding a highly naturalistic impression of the
actor.
The actor can be placed in virtual environments to create composite dynamic
scenes. Free-viewpoint video allows the creation of camera fly-throughs or
viewing the action interactively from arbitrary perspectives.