The plenoptic videos: capturing, rendering and compression

This paper presents a system for capturing and rendering a dynamic image-based representation called the plenoptic videos. It is a simplified version of light fields for dynamic environment, where user viewpoints are constrained along the camera plane of a linear array of video cameras. The system consists of a camera array of 8 Sony CCX-Z11 CCD cameras and eight Pentium 41.8 GHz computers connected together through a 100 baseT LAN. Important issues such as multiple camera calibration, real-time compression, decompression and rendering are addressed. Experimental results demonstrated the usefulness of the proposed parallel processing based system in capturing and rendering high quality dynamic image-based representation using off-the-shelf equipment, and its potential applications in visualization and immersive television systems.