A Flexible Pinhole Camera Model for Coherent Nonuniform Sampling

Abstract

-We present a pinhole camera model that allows modulating the sampling rate over the field of view with great flexibility. This flexible pinhole camera or FPC is defined by a viewpoint (i.e. eye) and by a sampling map that specifies the sampling locations on the image plane. The sampling map is constructed from known regions of interest with interactive and automatic approaches. The FPC provides an inexpensive 3-D projection operation which allows rendering complex datasets quickly, in feed-forward fashion, by projection followed by rasterization. The FPC supports many types of data, including image, height field, geometry, and volume data. The resulting image is a coherent non-uniform sampling (CoNUS) of the dataset that matches the local variation of the importance of the dataset. We demonstrate the advantages of CoNUS images in the contexts of remote visualization, of focus-pluscontext, and of acceleration of expensive rendering effects such as rendering of surface geometric detail and of specular reflections.