Virtual Video Camera: Image-Based Viewpoint Navigation Through Space and Time

We present an image-based rendering system to viewpoint-navigate through space and time of complex real-world, dynamic scenes. Our approach accepts unsynchronized, uncalibrated multivideo footage as input. Inexpensive, consumer-grade camcorders suffice to acquire arbitrary scenes, for example in the outdoors, without elaborate recording setup procedures, allowing also for hand-held recordings. Instead of scene depth estimation, layer segmentation or 3D reconstruction, our approach is based on dense image correspondences, treating view interpolation uniformly in space and time: spatial viewpoint navigation, slow motion or freeze-and-rotate effects can all be created in the same way. Acquisition simplification, integration of moving cameras, generalization to difficult scenes and space-time symmetric interpolation amount to a widely applicable virtual video camera system.