Virtual Video Camera: Image-Based Viewpoint Navigation Through Space and Time

We present an image-based rendering system to viewpoint-navigate through space and time of complex real-world, dynamic scenes. Our approach accepts unsynchronized, uncalibrated multi-video footage as input. Inexpensive, consumer-grade camcorders suffice to acquire arbitrary scenes, e.g., in the outdoors, without elaborate recording setup procedures. Instead of scene depth estimation, layer segmentation, or 3D reconstruction, our approach is based on dense image correspondences, treating view interpolation uniformly in space and time: spatial viewpoint navigation, slow motion, and freeze-and-rotate effects can all be created in the same fashion. Acquisition simplification, generalization to difficult scenes, and space-time symmetric interpolation amount to a widely applicable Virtual Video Camera system.