Compression and Real-Time Rendering of Inward Looking Spherical Light Fields

Abstract

Photorealistic rendering is an essential tool for immersive virtual reality. In this regard, the data structure of choice is typically light fields since they contain multidimensional information about the captured environment that can provide motion parallax and view-dependent information such as highlights. There are various ways to acquire light fields depending on the nature of the scene, limitations on the capturing setup, and the application at hand. Our focus in this paper is on full-parallax imaging of large-scale static objects for photorealistic real-time rendering. To this end, we introduce and simulate a new design for capturing inward-looking spherical light fields, and propose a system for efficient compression and real-time rendering of such data using consumer-level hardware suitable for virtual reality applications.