Russell Manning > Research > Turntable View Interpolation

The Problem: An object sits on a turntable and is viewed by a fixed, uncalibrated camera. The turntable is rotated and a second view of the object is captured from the fixed camera. Using these two views, generate new views of the object for any rotation of the turntable.

Alternatively... Instead of using a turntable, place an object on a flat surface and view it with a camera on a tripod at a fixed height above the surface. Move the camera to a second position, maintaining constant height above the surface, and acquire a second view of the object. These two views are equivalent to the turntable scenario described above.

Example: The two views below show a model of a building sitting on a turntable (Fig. 1). The second view was captured after rotating the turntable a small amount. Below the reference views is a synthetic view of the building, in this case shown from one end (Fig. 2). Notice occlusion has been handled correctly. The new view represents one particular rotation of the turntable; by generating views from different rotations, a movie can be created showing the turntable rotating smoothly (Fig. 3). Any "warpiness" observed in the output is due to small errors in correspondence, which become amplified the further the synthetic view is from the reference views.

A demonstration movie is available as an ".avi" file compressed with the DivX codec. This movie was generated from 9 reference views (unlike the examples shown below which were generated from just 2 views) using our technique to fill in the missing frames: [1.6M DivX AVI]