Parallax Photography: Creating 3D Motions from Stills

Photography is the process of making pictures by literally ¿drawing with light¿, albeit in a limited and restricted way. The recent digitization of photography offers unprecedented opportunities to move beyond the traditional constraints of analog photography, and lead to the enhancement and enrichment of visual media. In this book, we explore one approach to addressing this challenge, namely, parallax photography. Our approach begins by capturing multiple digital photographs of a scene from different viewpoints exhibiting parallax. We present algorithms that find dense correspondences among the captured imagery, as well as algorithms for seamless interpolation. The approach also embodies methods and interfaces that identify and highlight the interesting pieces of the captured data, and data representations for efficient storing and rendering. As we show in this book, the results, which allow re- experiencing subtle parallax, create a more visceral sense of immersion in the scene than traditional photographs.