Interpolating 360 degree Images out of only 8 images that are 45 degrees apart

Question

Sony has demonstrated a very nice technology in Siggraph 2010 where an object can be displayed on a "round LCD" so it could be visible from all directions in 3D without the use of special glasses.

This is very nice but in the demonstration movie I saw something that caught my eye. In order to display a 360 degree image they have to generate 360 images (one degree apart) of the object they want to show. Sony are able to interpolate 360 images from only 8 (45 degrees apart).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BFKC-NKRFw&feature=player_embedded#!

I was looking allot for such mothod/algorithem and I would be very happy to know if there is a paper on the subject. Anyone?

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/28/sonys-360-degree-raymodeler-3d-display-brings-its-glasses-free/

Thanks.

Gilad.

Answer 1

This movie is extremely deceptive about what is going on. The Sony RayModeler is not an 'autostereoscopic' display, it's a full volumetric display generated by a high-speed rotating LED array. The device requires all 360 images, there is no interpolation from 8 images to 360 happening in the device.

The 8 cameras business is just a standard passive multiview stereo setup that is separate from the RayModeler. There are literally hundreds of papers on the topic, see http://vision.middlebury.edu/mview/

If you wanted to solve the problem you described though, it's called "light field interpolation" and you can read about it in this paper by Atalay and Mount, http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mount/Projects/InterpOLF/ijcga.pdf

Answer 2

Why do you look at their Siggraph paper ? You should find explanation and pointers to other papers with similar work.

Answer 3

I don't think it's an accident that the most impressive images were the ones generated by artificial 3D models.

The interpolation between the 45 degree cameras could be done by doing a perspective correction to account for the interpolated camera position. The hard part would be to blend the resulting images; for example the image at 22 degrees would need to blend in nearly equal amounts the perspective corrected images from the 0 degree camera and the 45 degree camera.