Computer Vision Talks at Columbia University

Omnigraphics: An alternate view of image synthesis

Swami Manohar

Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

Host: Shree K. Nayar

2:00 p.m. - September 17^th, 1999

Interschool Laboratory, 7^th floor CEPSR, Schapiro Building, Computer Science

Abstract

The traditional graphics pipeline has been developed over the past three decades using the synthetic camera as the model for image synthesis. In this talk we present omnigraphics, a new view of image synthesis based on the analog of a camera that has 360-degree field of view. Several research groups are pursuing the development of 360-degree field of view cameras. Our work is inspired by and uses the results of the OmniVideo research at Columbia University. We have developed the entire image synthesis pipeline for omnigraphics. We describe algorithms for scan-conversion of simple primitives, lighting, shading, texture-mapping, anti-aliasing and ray tracing.

We describe the omnigraphics library and a perspective viewer that implement the above algorithms, and illustrate the potential of this approach using several synthesized images. The basic advantage of omnigraphics is that, using a single traversal of the graphics database, any number of arbitrary views can be generated from a single view from a different perspective can open up alternate solutions to hard problems in traditional graphics. We highlight immediate applications of omnigraphics that include, image generation for environments like the CAVE and Omni-animation and conclude by presenting the challenges ahead.