Interactive Spacetime Reconstruction

About

My dissertation generalizes my previously published work on interactive stereo (spatial), interactive optical flow (temporal) and interactive scene flow (spatio-temporal) to address the wider topic of creating high-quality spatio-temporal reconstructions by integrating various forms of user interaction.

Abstract

High-quality dense spatial and/or temporal reconstructions and correspondence maps from camera images, be it optical flow, stereo or scene flow, are an essential prerequisite for a multitude of computer vision and graphics tasks, e.g. scene editing or view interpolation in visual media production. Due to the ill-posed nature of the estimation problem in typical setups (i.e. limited amount of cameras, limited frame rate), automated estimation approaches are prone to erroneous correspondences and subsequent quality degradation in many non-trivial cases such as occlusions, ambiguous movements, long displacements, or low texture. While improving estimation algorithms is one obvious possible direction, this thesis complementarily concerns itself with creating intuitive, high-level user interactions that lead to improved correspondence maps and scene reconstructions. Where visually convincing results are essential, rendering artifacts resulting from estimation errors are usually repaired by hand with image editing tools, which is time consuming and therefore costly. My new user interactions, which integrate human scene recognition capabilities to guide a semi-automatic correspondence or scene reconstruction algorithm, save considerable effort and enable faster and more efficient production of visually convincing rendered images.

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Citation

Kai Ruhl (2015). Interactive Spacetime Reconstruction in Computer Graphics. Dissertation, TU Braunschweig, July 2015.

@phdthesis{ruhl2015diss,
    author = {Ruhl, Kai},
    title = {Interactive Spacetime Reconstruction in Computer Graphics},
    school = {{TU} Braunschweig},
    type = {Dissertation},
    month = jul,
    year = {2015}
}