NVIDIA Corporation
Light fields as better backgrounds in rendering

Abstract:

The introduced method and system use a 4-dimensional (4D) light field as a background of a scene, instead of 2D background image. Realizing computing a light field takes tremendous amounts of processing power, data storage and time (even with the currently available hardware), the introduced method and system compute and store the light field before rendering a scene. To reduce the time storing and accessing the light field during the rendering process, the introduced method and system also uses a modified video codec to compress and decompress the light field as 2D images.