Rail-Track Viewer - An Image-Based Virtual Walkthrough System

Abstract

Complex renderings of synthetic scenes or virtual environments, once deemed impossible for consumer rendering, are becoming available as tools for young artists. These renderings, due to their high-quality image synthesis, can take minutes to hours to render. Nowadays, as the computing power has increased dramatically, the size and complexity of the datasets generated by the super-computer can be overwhelming. It is almost impossible for the visualization techniques to achieve interactive frame rates. Our work focuses on using Image-Based Rendering (IBR) techniques to manage and explore large and complex datasets and virtual scenes on a remote display across the world-wide-web. The key idea for this research is to pre-process the datasets and render key viewpoints on pre-selected paths inside the dataset. We present new techniques to reconstruct approximations to any view along the path, which allows the user to roam around inside the datasets with interactive frame rates. We have implemented the pipeline for generating the sampled key viewpoints and reconstructing panoramic-based IBR models. Our implementation includes an efficient two-phase caching and pre-fetching scheme. The system has been successfully tested on several datasets and satisfying results have been obtained. Analysis of errors is also presented.