The Lumigraph

This paper discusses a new method for capturing the complete appearance of bothsynthetic and real world objects and scenes,representing this information, and then using this representation to render images of the object from new camera positions. Unlike the shape capture process traditionally used in computer vision and the rendering process traditionally used in computer graphics, our approach does not rely on geometric representations. Instead we sample and reconstruct a 4D function. which we call a Lumigraph. The Lumigraph is a subset o f the complete plenoptic fu nction that describes the flow of light at all positions in all directions. With the Lumigraph. new images of the object can be generated very quick]y,independentof the geometric or illumination complexity of the scene or object. The paper discusses a complete working system including the capture of sainples. the construction of the Lumigraph, and thesubsequent rendering of images from this new representation.