Cell-based multi-view sequence encoding for representation of 3D object

Abstract

Representation and storage of 3D objects or scenes have been the essential parts of many applications. Recently, there are growing demands for providing more sophisticated and intelligent representation of 3D objects or scenes in many applications such as computer graphics communication, natural and synthetic scene coding/composition, Virtual reality and telepresence applications, and various multimedia internet applications. Geometry-based rendering has been the typical approach to these problems. But, this approach has several major drawbacks. To solve these problems, image-based rendering has been introduced and developed by many researchers in recent years. Image-based rendering is a powerful and promising approach for 3D object representation. It is fundamentally different from traditional geometry-based rendering. This approach considers a 3D object or a scene as a collection of images while geometry-based rendering uses mathematical descriptions of an object. Such collection of images is called key frame and taken from the predefined reference viewpoints. Thus image-based rendering system should be able to generate intermediate views of the object using these key frames. In an image-based rendering system, the computation required to render an object is only dependent on the number of pixels in the key frames, not on the geometric complexity of the object. But the conventional image-based rendering approaches described in the literature have some problems. First, they need the exact pixel-by-pixel correspondences and the depth information of each pixel which are difficult to calculate or may not be available in some cases. These methods also require that the disparity map as well as the key frames should be properly encoded and stored. This is not desirable because the size of the disparity map is also extra burden. Second, although they do not require the exact pixel-by-pixel correspondences and the depth information of each pixel, an enormous set of ke...