An Efficient 3D Plenoptic Representation for Approximating a Path of Motion to a Curved Line

We constrain camera motion to a curved line, and capture panoramic images at discrete points along the line. An efficient 3D plenoptic representation is created using the panoramic images. The method does not need to recover geometric models of the scene and the new view is gotten directly from the sampled images of the scene. Moreover, the user can observe significant parallax and lighting changes at a point away from the sampling line. Compared with 4D plenoptic representation, such as lumigraph or light field, the amount of data is much decreased. By combining this 3D plenoptic function with the other plenoptic functions (3D or 4D), a larger scene can be represented. This representation has good storage and computational efficiency, and is very easy to capture. This paper discusses a complete working system, from capturing and construction to rendering of linear mosaics, using synthetic environments and real scenes.