High-quality visualization for geographically distributed 3-D teleimmersive applications

The growing popularity of 3-D movies has led to the rapid development of numerous affordable consumer 3-D displays. In contrast, the development of technology to generate 3-D content has lagged behind considerably. In spite of significant improvements to the quality of imaging devices, the accuracy of the algorithms that generate 3-D data, and the hardware available to render such data, the algorithms available to calibrate, reconstruct, and then visualize such data remain difficult to use, extremely noise sensitive, and unreasonably slow. In this paper, we present a multi-camera system that creates a highly accurate (on the order of a centimeter), 3-D reconstruction of an environment in real-time (under 30 ms) that allows for remote interaction between users. This paper focuses on addressing the aforementioned deficiencies by describing algorithms to calibrate, reconstruct, and render objects in the system. We demonstrate the accuracy and speed of our results on a variety of benchmarks and data collected from our own system.