ImageFlow: Real-Time Image-Based Rendering

深度图像被用作高性能图形引擎中的渲染原语，该引擎正在本项目中构建。 深度图像是除了颜色和其他属性之外还包括相对于视点的深度的二维图像。 从少量的深度图像中，每个深度图像表示来自单个视点的任意复杂场景，可以针对原始视点的邻域内的任何视点计算图像。 这种基于图像的渲染方法在真实性和在生成深度图像的处理器和将深度图像重新投影到新视点的处理器之间分配渲染计算方面提供了优势。 该项目是利用现有的PixelFlow图形引擎来测试基于图像的渲染思想. 在项目的第一部分，将研究获取和预处理深度图像的算法。 同时，PixelFlow机器将增强图像采集和存储功能。 这将允许用于基于图像的渲染的软件在PixelFlow机器上实时运行，执行以下操作：确定要用作深度像素源的参考图像，将参考图像像素扭曲到屏幕空间，评估每个像素的颜色、面积和其他参数，以及混合像素以形成最终参考图像。 在项目的后期阶段，可能会为其中一些业务开发和评估硬件支持。

Depth images are used as rendering primitives in the high-performance graphics engine that is being constructed in this project. A depth image is a two- dimensional image that includes depth relative to a viewpoint, in addition to color and other properties. From a small number of depth images, each of which represents an arbitrarily complex scene from a single viewpoint, an image can be computed for any viewpoint within the neighborhood of the original viewpoints. This image-based rendering approach offers advantages in realism and distributing the rendering computation among processors that generate depth images and those that reproject them to new viewpoints. The project is using the existing PixelFlow graphics engine to test the image- based rendering ideas. During the first part of the project, algorithms for acquiring and pre-processing depth images will be investigated. At the same time, the PixelFlow machine will be enhanced for image acquisition and storage. This will permit software for image-based rendering to run in real-time on the PixelFlow machine, performing the following operations: determination of reference images to be used as sources of depth pixels, warping of reference image pixels to the screen space, evaluation color, area, and other parameters for each pixel, and blending of pixels to form the final reference image. In later stages of the project, hardware support may be developed and evaluated for some of these operations.