Sea of Images

A Sea of Images is a practical approach to very dense sampling of large, complex indoor environments. We capture 15000 images over 1000 square feet of floor space at an average image spacing of 1.5 inches. We demonstrate that such dense sampling produces very realistic walkthroughs of real-world environments at 15 frames per second, reproducing specular reflections and vertical occlusions. We capture the environments in no more than an afternoon and automatically calibrate the images using highly accurate camera pose estimation. We devise a multiresolution image compression scheme that reduces the overall storage and bandwidth requirements and, in addition, is well suited for working set management. Finally we obtain interactive rates through image prefetching that adapts to processor speed, bandwidth restrictions, and cache size.