Image-based modeling and rendering of architecture with interactive photogrammetry and view-dependent texture mapping

We overview an approach to modeling and rendering architectural scenes from a sparse set of photographs. The approach is designed to require no special hardware and to produce real-time renderings on standard graphics hardware. The modeling method is an interactive photogrammetric modeling tool for recovering geometric models of architectural scenes from photographs. The tool is practical as an interactive method because it solves directly for architectural dimensions rather than for a multitude of vertex coordinates or depth measurements. The technique also determines the camera positions of the photographs, allowing the photographs to be taken from arbitrary unrecorded locations. The rendering method creates novel views of the scene based on the recovered model and the original photographs. A view-dependent texture mapping method allows all available image information to be used to produce the most photorealistic renderings. We focus on a number of results and applications of the method.