Rendering with concentric mosaics

This paper presents a novel 3D plenoptic function, which we call concentric mosaics. We constrain camera motion to planar concentric circles, and create concentric mosaics using a manifold mosaic for each circle (i.e., composing slit images taken at different locations). Concentric mosaics index all input image rays naturally in 3 parameters: radius, rotation angle and vertical elevation. Novel views are rendered by combining the appropriate captured rays in an efficient manner at rendering time. Although vertical distortions exist in the rendered images, they can be alleviated by depth correction. Like panoramas, concentric mosaics do not require recovering geometric and photometric scene models. Moreover, concentric mosaics provide a much richer user experience by allowing the user to move freely in a circular region and observe significant parallax and lighting changes. Compared with a Lightfield or Lumigraph, concentric mosaics have much smaller file size because only a 3D plenoptic function is constructed. Concentric mosaics have good space and computational efficiency, and are very easy to capture. This paper discusses a complete working system from capturing, construction, compression, to rendering of concentric mosaics from synthetic and real environments.