3-D computer graphics based on integral photography

Integral photography (IP), which is one of the ideal 3-D photographic technologies, can be regarded as a method of capturing and displaying light rays passing through a plane. The NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratories have developed a real-time IP system using an HDTV camera and an optical ber array. In this paper, the authors propose a method of synthesizing arbitrary views from IP images captured by the HDTV camera. This is a kind of image-based rendering system, founded on the 4-D data space representation of light rays. Experimental results show the potential to improve the quality of images rendered by computer graphics techniques. (C) 2001 Optical Society of America.