Exploiting Repetitions for Image-Based Rendering of Facades

Simon Rodriguez (1, 2) , Adrien Bousseau (1, 2) , Fredo Durand (3, 2) , George Drettakis (1, 2)

1 GRAPHDECO - GRAPHics and DEsign with hEterogeneous COntent
2 COMUE UCA - COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019)
3 MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract Street-level imagery is now abundant but does not have sufficient capture density to be usable for Image-Based Rendering (IBR) of facades. We present a method that exploits repetitive elements in facades – such as windows – to perform data augmentation, in turn improving camera calibration, reconstructed geometry and overall rendering quality for IBR. The main intuition behind our approach is that a few views of several instances of an element provide similar information to many views of a single instance of that element. We first select similar instances of an element from 3-4 views of a facade and transform them into a common coordinate system, creating a " platonic " element. We use this common space to refine the camera calibration of each view of each instance and to reconstruct a 3D mesh of the element with multi-view stereo, that we regularize to obtain a piecewise-planar mesh aligned with dominant image contours. Observing the same element under multiple views also allows us to identify reflective areas – such as glass panels – which we use at rendering time to generate plausible reflections using an environment map. Our detailed 3D mesh, augmented set of views, and reflection mask enable image-based rendering of much higher quality than results obtained using the input images directly.

Mots clés: Computer graphics; Image-based rendering; 3D reconstruction

Domaines: Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]

Simon Rodriguez, Adrien Bousseau, Fredo Durand, George Drettakis. Exploiting Repetitions for Image-Based Rendering of Facades. Computer Graphics Forum, 2018, 37. ⟨hal-01814058⟩