Unstructured Light Fields

Abstract We present a system for interactively acquiring and rendering light fields using a hand‐held commodity camera. The main challenge we address is assisting a user in achieving good coverage of the 4D domain despite the challenges of hand‐held acquisition. We define coverage by bounding reprojection error between viewpoints, which accounts for all 4 dimensions of the light field. We use this criterion together with a recent Simultaneous Localization and Mapping technique to compute a coverage map on the space of viewpoints. We provide users with real‐time feedback and direct them toward under‐sampled parts of the light field. Our system is lightweight and has allowed us to capture hundreds of light fields. We further present a new rendering algorithm that is tailored to the unstructured yet dense data we capture. Our method can achieve piecewise‐bicubic reconstruction using a triangulation of the captured viewpoints and subdivision rules applied to reconstruction weights.