A Method for Surface Reconstruction and Synthesizing Intermediate Images for Multi-viewpoint 3-D Displays

In this paper, a method for 3-D surface reconstruction with two real cameras is presented. The method, which combines the extraction of binocular disparity and its interpolation can be applied to the synthesis of images from virtual viewpoints. The synthesized virtual images are as natural as the real images even when we observe the images as stereoscopic images. The method opens up many applications, such as synthesizing input images for multi-viewpoint 3-D displays, enhancing the depth impression in 2-D images and so on. We also have developed a video-rate stereo machine able to obtain binocular disparity in 1/30 sec with two cameras. We show the performance of the machine.