Build-by-Number: Rearranging the Real World to Visualize Novel Architectural Spaces

We present build-by-number, a technique for quickly designing architectural structures that can be rendered photorealistically at interactive rates. We combine image-based capturing and rendering with procedural modeling techniques to allow the creation of novel structures in the style of real-world structures. Starting with a simple model recovered from a sparse image set, the model is divided into feature regions, such as doorways, windows, and brick. These feature regions essentially comprise a mapping from model space to image space, and can be recombined to texture a novel model. Procedural rules for the growth and reorganization of the model are automatically derived to allow for very fast editing and design. Further, the redundancies marked by the feature labeling can be used to perform automatic occlusion replacement and color equalization in the finished scene, which is rendered using view-dependent texture mapping on standard graphics hardware. Results using four captured scenes show that a great variety of novel structures can be created very quickly once a captured scene is available, and rendered with a degree of realism comparable to the original scene.