Detour Light Field Rendering for Diminished Reality Using Unstructured Multiple Views

Instructor's perspective videos are useful for presenting intuitive visual instructions for trainees in medical and industrial settings. In such videos, the instructor's arms often obstruct the trainee's view of the work area. In this article, we present a diminished reality method for visualizing the work area hidden by an instructor's arms by capturing the work area with multiple cameras. To achieve such diminished reality, we propose detour light field rendering (DLFR), in which light rays avoid passing through penalty points set in the unstructured light fields reconstructed from multiple viewpoint images. In DLFR, the camera blending field used in an existing freeviewpoint image generation method known as unstructured lumigraph is re-designed based on our use cases. In this re-design, lesser weights are given to light rays as they pass close to given penalty points. Experimental results demonstrate that using DLFR, the appearance of an undesirable object can be removed from an image in real time.