Computational Photography for Capturing Virtual Environments

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Image-based virtual environments for navigation, training and computer animation are attractive, but generating high-quality and physically plausible large environments is still beyond today's technology. Many research challenges remain, including making large image-based environments consistent despite changes in illumination during capture and displaying them afterwards under different illumination. Another major challenge is to give image-based environments some interactive physical behaviour, e.g., a response to interactive forces. Image-based virtual environments must become richer to provide these new capabilities which will enable novel applications in the computer animation industry, in mobile navigation and in security, in monitoring of assets and in simulation-based training. The proposed research addresses these challenges by changing the capture process to include computation directly into the image acquisition. Computation during capture can steer the imaging process to acquire the necessary information for the image-based environment, e.g., through on-line tracking of surfaces or by adjusting image exposure to capture all image areas correctly exposed. Scalability of the capture process will be addressed by investigating incremental methods which allow to add new images to an existing environment. Incremental methods will also help with dynamic scenarios where the environment evolves over time. The research will have excellent opportunities to train highly-qualified personnel in fields with many Canadian small and medium enterprises ready to take-up this personnel. Software engineering skills are critically important in today's economy and this research will create software experts in real-world sensors and cameras, in computer vision and in mobile parallel computing on today's graphics processing units (GPU) and on the CPU, as well as in human computer interaction but it will also ensure that highly-qualified personnel will acquire the fundamental mathematical and physical background to set them apart and ensure their long-term success.