Polyhedral hull online compositing system: Texturing and reflections.

Master's thesis, Cornell University, August 2005.

The Polyhedral Hull Online Compositing System is a prototype system which merges live dynamic video and three dimensional synthetic imagery at interactive frame-rates. This system captures video from convergent cameras and performs geometric reconstruction to generate a three dimensional mesh. Utilizing the background geometry which is generated by an external renderer and the reconstructed mesh, this system adds shadows and reflections to the final composite image. The combination creates a perceptual link between the two otherwise disjoint environments. The computed mesh reconstruction allows this system to be view independent, which is a major advantage over previous state-of-the-art systems. By using modern graphics hardware and a distributed computing model to capture and process live video data with synthetic three dimensional imagery into final composites, we provide an economic alternative to standard commercial systems.

The texturing and refction processes, two key parts of the Polyhedral Hull Online Construction System, are described in detail in this thesis. The texturing processes explore the problem of providing a visually plausible, view-independent representation with only four video cameras capturing live data. The reection process calculates the dominant specular highlight of the live object in order to render visually convincing results. These processes add degrees of realism so that final composite image is a visually plausible merger of real and synthetic imagery.

This paper is available as a PDF file Kra05.pdf (3.6M).