Rendering dynamic real-world scenes using image spheres

We introduce Image Spheres – a novel approach for rendering dynamic real-world scenes. As sensors for online geometry reconstruction enhance more and more, it is desirable to render their output while up-to-date color information is applied. Images received from cameras mounted on moving pan-tilt units are uploaded to the graphic memory almost immediately after they are received. With very low preprocessing they are used to color the perpetually updated geometry immediately. To control graphic memory usage, our method includes a fast image replacement algorithm which regards redundancy when deciding which image to delete. We demonstrate our results on high polygonal laser scan models combined with geometry data received by a Photonic Mixer Device range sensor.