Voxelizing light-field recordings

Light fields are an emerging image-based technique that support free viewpoint navigation of recorded scenes as demanded in several recent applications (e.g., Virtual Reality). Pure image-based representations, however quickly become inefficient, as a large number of images are required to be captured, stored, and processed. Geometric scene representations require less storage and are more efficient to render. Geometry reconstruction, however, is unreliable and might fail for complex scene parts. Furthermore, view-dependent effects that are preserved with light fields are lost in pure geometry-based techniques. Therefore, we propose a hybrid representation and rendering scheme for recorded dense light fields: we extract isotropic scene regions and represent them by voxels, while the remaining areas are represented as sparse light field. In comparison to dense light fields, storage demands are reduced while visual quality is sustained.