This paper presents a virtual driving system with real-world images as one of the promising applications for the ITS. To allow users to drive freely and look at arbitrary views in the virtual world, a new method for creating a 3D virtual broad city environment based on the Image-Based Rendering (IBR) is proposed. The strength of the system is that we are able to easily render any view from an arbitrary point to an arbitrary direction on the ground in a virtual environment; previous methods, on the other hand, have strong restraints concerning their re-constructable areas. The method first captures panoramic images by vehicle running along a straight line, indexing the capturing position of each image. The rendering process consists of selecting some suitable slits divided vertically from stored images, and reassembling them to create an image from a novel observation point. Using the rendering method, any photo-realistic view on any lane on the road from images taken by running along just one lane can be generated.
Samenvatting