Generation of binocular object movies from monocular object movies

Object movie (OM) is a popular technique for producing interactive 3D artifacts because of its simplicity in production and it photo-realistic ability to present the artifacts. At the same time, many stereoscopic vision techniques are developed for a variety of applications. However, the traditional approach for generating binocular object movies require duplicate effort compared with monocular ones both in the process of acquisition and image processing. Therefore, we propose a framework to generate stereo OMs from monocular ones with the help of an automatically constructed 3D model from the monocular OM. Here, a new representation of the 3D model, named billboard clusters, is proposed for efficient generating binocular views. In order to obtain better results, a novel approach to extract view-independent texture is developed in this work. Besides, billboard clusters can be used to compress the storage capacity of OMs, and to perform relighting so that the binocular OMs can be well augmented into virtual environments with different lighting conditions. This paper describes the methods in detail and reports on its wide applications.