The Graph Camera

A conventional pinhole camera captures only a small fraction of a 3-D scene due to occlusions. We introduce the graph camera, a non-pinhole with rays that circumvent occluders to create a single layer image that shows simultaneously several regions of interest in a 3-D scene. The graph camera image exhibits good continuity and little redundancy. The graph camera model is literally a graph of tens of planar pinhole cameras. A fast projection operation allows rendering in feed-forward fashion, at interactive rates, which provides support for dynamic scenes. The graph camera is an infrastructure level tool with many applications. We explore the graph camera benefits in the contexts of virtual 3-D scene exploration and summarization, and in the context of real-world 3-D scene visualization. The graph camera allows integrating multiple video feeds seamlessly, which enables monitoring complex real-world spaces with a single image.

Voicu S Popescu, Paul Rosen, and Nicoletta Adamo-Villani. The Graph Camera. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 2009.

@article{popescu2009graph,
  title = {The Graph Camera},
  author = {Popescu, Voicu S and Rosen, Paul and Adamo-Villani, Nicoletta},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)},
  volume = {28},
  pages = {158:1--158:8},
  year = {2009},
  keywords = {camera models, image-based rendering, interactive rendering, non-pinholes,
panoramas, video integration},
  note = {textit{Presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009.}},
  abstract = {A conventional pinhole camera captures only a small fraction of a 3-D scene
    due to occlusions. We introduce the graph camera, a non-pinhole with rays that
    circumvent occluders to create a single layer image that shows simultaneously several
    regions of interest in a 3-D scene. The graph camera image exhibits good continuity and
    little redundancy. The graph camera model is literally a graph of tens of planar pinhole
    cameras. A fast projection operation allows rendering in feed-forward fashion, at
    interactive rates, which provides support for dynamic scenes. The graph camera is an
    infrastructure level tool with many applications. We explore the graph camera benefits
    in the contexts of virtual 3-D scene exploration and summarization, and in the context
    of real-world 3-D scene visualization. The graph camera allows integrating multiple
    video feeds seamlessly, which enables monitoring complex real-world spaces with a single
    image.}
}