Sea of Images

In this paper, we present a "Sea of Images," a practical approach to dense sampling, storage, and reconstruction of the plenoptic function in large, complex indoor environments. We use a motorized cart to capture omnidirectional images every few inches on an eye-height plane throughout an environment. The captured images are compressed and stored in a multiresolution hierarchy suitable for real-time prefetching during an interactive walkthrough. Later, novel images are reconstructed for a simulated observer by resampling nearby captured images.