Computational crowd camera : enabling remote-vision via sparse collective plenoptic sampling

In this thesis, I present a near real-time algorithm for interactively exploring a collectively captured moment without explicit 3D reconstruction. This system favors immediacy and local coherency to global consistency. It is common to represent photos as vertices of a weighted graph, where edge weights measure similarity or distance between pairs of photos. I introduce Angled Graphs as a new data structure to organize collections of photos in a way that enables the construction of visually smooth paths. Weighted angled graphs extend weighted graphs with angles and angle weights which penalize turning along paths. As a result, locally straight paths can be computed by specifying a photo and a direction. The weighted angled graphs of photos used in this paper can be regarded as the result of discretizing the Riemannian geometry of the high dimensional manifold of all possible photos. Ultimately, this system enables everyday people to take advantage of each others' perspectives in order to create on-the-spot spatiotemporal visual experiences similar to the popular bullet-time sequence. I believe that this type of application will greatly enhance shared human experiences spanning from events as personal as parents watching their children's football game to highly publicized red carpet galas. In addition, security applications can greatly benefit from such a system by quickly making sense of a large collection of visual data.

Department dc:contributor.department

Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Arpa, Aydın

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ramesh Raskar and Robin M. A. Dawson.

• Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/82422

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/82422