Wide Area Visuals for a Simulator in a Box

Department of Computer Science

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Henry Fuchs (PI), Herman Towles, Marc Pollefeys

Chris Ashworth and Patrick Quirk – Graduate RAs

Project Overview

Develop a robust multi-projector display and rendering system that is portable, and rapidly setup and deployed in a variety of geometrically complex display environments.

 

Research Goals

Our goals include seamless geometric and photometric image projection, and continuous self-calibration using one or more pan-tilt-zoom cameras.

 

Basic Calibration Method

Use two pan-tilt-zoom cameras and adapt the calibration procedures developed by Sinha[1] to geometrically calibrate an array of projectors and extract an accurate display surface model. This method is expected to achieve excellent panoramic registration and compensation for lens distortion in both the camera and projectors.

 

Rendering System

Build a PC-cluster rendering system that uses a 2-pass rendering algorithm running on either Chromium or UNC’s PixelFlex[2] software framework.

 

Continuous Calibration using Imperceptible Structured Light[3]

Embed structured light patterns in normal color imagery so it is imperceptible to humans observing the display yet visible to a synchronized camera. The recovered structure light imagery is then used to continuously refine the calibration geometry while the system is in use, making the system more tolerant to changes in display geometry.

DARPA DARWARS Program
Award No. N00014-03-1-0589


[1] S. Sinha and M. Pollefeys, “Towards Calibrating a Pan-Tilt-Zoom Camera Network”, 5th Workshop on Omnidirectional Vision, Camera Networks, and Non-classical Cameras (OMNIVIS), May 16, 2004.

[2] “A. Raij, G. Gill, A. Majumder, H. Towles, “PixelFlex2: A Comprehensive, Automatic, Casually-Aligned Multi-Projector Display”, International Workshop on Projector-Camera Systems (PROCAMS), October 2003.

[3] D. Cotting, M. Naef, M. Gross, H. Fuchs “Embedding Imperceptible Patterns into Projected Images for Simultaneous Acquisition and Display”, International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 04), Nov 2-5, 2004.