Auto-registration techniques for immersive multi-projector displays

As the size and complexity of our data continue to grow at an exponential rate, the need for visual interfaces to see, understand, and manipulate it in the same scale and complexity is becoming evident. Hence, immersive high-resolution displays, usually made of multiple projectors to provide a seamless visual experience, are becoming an essential part of many visualization and virtual reality (VR) systems. These displays come in different shapes starting from cylinders, hemispherical domes, and truncated domes to more general curved surfaces. They come in different scales like small personalized displays, as are used in gaming consoles or training and simulation systems, to large multi-user installations as are used in large data visualization environments, planetariums, and theme parks. However, building such displays to provide a seamless visualization experience entails several difficult challenges. We can categorize these challenges as geometric registration and color registration. The geometric registration assures that the overlapping pixels show the same content and the images looks prospectively correct to the user. Color registration assures that there are no visible color or brightness seams across the multi-projector display. Such seams can be caused by the extra brightness in the overlap regions of the projectors or by the different color properties of the projector. In my thesis, I develop automatic geometric and color registration techniques for large non-planar immersive displays.