In the following pages you will find an informal, but detailed overview of the internal workings and motivation of the system.

Capturing and modeling real-world scenes and objects from video alone is a long standing problem in computer vision and graphics. Unlike active methods (such as laser range finders), video-based methods allow quick and non-intrusive capture using inexpensive commodity cameras (e.g. web cams, digital cameras or camcorders) and a consumer PC is sufficient for the processing and rendering. In our method uncalibrated video from different views of an object or scene are compiled into a geometry and texture model. The geometric modeling is based on recent results in non-Euclidean multiview geometry, and the texture is represented using a novel texture basis capturing fine scale geometric and light variation over the surface. During rendering view dependent textures are blended from this basis and warped onto the geometric model to generate new views.

On this web site you can find both details on the theory as well as downloads of a working system and some sample models. The system is capable of frame rate rendering by performing the calculation intensive code either (depending on your installed HW) on the CPU through MMX SIMD extensions on the graphics card using NVIDIA register combiners. Rendering and viewing of models is easy to set up and use on either Windows or Linux PCs. The software for capturing and processing video into models currently only runs under Linux and is somewhat more complex to install, but it is doable for someone with intermediate knowledge on how to configure Linux for digital video.