A Scalable Internet-Based Walkthrough Environment with Panoramic Images

An important, potential application of image-based techniques is to create photo-realistic image-based environments for interactive walkthroughs, in particular over the Internet. However, existing image-based studies mainly focus on individual parts of the pipeline with various assumptions. There is a lack of a general framework or architecture for evaluation and development of a practical image-based walkthrough environment. In this paper, we propose an architecture to unify different image-based methods. Based on the architecture, we propose an image-based system to support interactive walkthrough of scalable environments. In particular, we introduce the concept of angular range, which is useful for designing a scalable configuration, recovering geometric proxy as well as rendering. It localizes the panoramic images needed for rendering, allowing it to support dynamic streaming of images for interactive walkthroughs. We also propose a new method to recover geometry information even from outdoor scenes and a new rendering method to address the problem of abrupt visual changes in a scalable environment.