IBR camera system for live TV production

Abstract: Traditional television and video recordings are limited to show only views of a scene from were a camera is positioned. For certain situations, positioning a camera at the most attractive viewpoints might not be possible, such as above a crowd at a concert. In this thesis, technologies for alleviating this limitation, and extending traditional filming processes, by using video-based rendering methods are investigated. With such video-based rendering methods, given a set of existing cameras, images from novel viewpoints can be produced without having any capturing device at the chosen viewpoint. This thesis investigates the current state of image and video-based systems for creating virtual camera views, which techniques are used in different approaches, and what the current limitations are. Furthermore, an implementation of a virtual camera system is created which can be run on consumer graphics hardware. By merging geometries from different cameras, calculated with a stereo algorithm, a representation of the current scene can be rendered. The viewpoint can be changed by a user interactively in real-time.