Room-size illusion and recovery of the true appearance.

Abstract

It is widely known among photographers that photographing a room with a wide-angle lens exaggerates the size of the room; nevertheless, such images are commonly found on hotel-reservation web sites. The present paper points out that the size exaggeration is a kind of optical illusion caused by an inappropriate viewpoint from which the image is seen, and presents a method we developed for removing the illusion and thus recovering the true appearance of the room. This method requires only a single image together with the lens center at which the image is taken. From this information, we can generate images that would be obtained if we stand at the same point as the camera and pan around the original scene, changing the view direction. The validity of the method is shown by examples. Possible applications to size-exaggerated images posted on web sites are also discussed.