Re:Jump – Experiences like you're actually there
by bigiain on Thursday May 28, 2015 @11:07PM
(#9622477)
I don't know specs of the HERO4, but the GoPro HERO3 has a 170 degree view angle - so that 16 camera rig has a _significant_ overlap. I suspect you could generate both "adjacent camera" and "every second camera" stereoscopic pairs without too much difficulty, and you can probably even extract useable data out of the "every third camera" pairs and their ~30 degree view overlap. My guess is everything seen by that rig is viewed by 3 distinct pairs (a&a+1, a&a+3, and a&a+3), and that the entire scene from a 16 camera 170fov rig could be considered to have 16 a&a+1 pairs, 16 a&a+2 pairs and 16 a&a+3 pairs giving you three stereo views with different baselines for every point in the scene. I'm guessing there's a _lot_ of spatial information in there.
Re:Jump – Experiences like you're actually there
by bigiain on Thursday May 28, 2015 @11:28PM
(#9622528)
Actually, I just realised all those HERO4's are mounted in portrait orientation, so they won't be getting 170 degrees of horizontal view, and you probably aren't going to get useful overlap between the a&a+3 camera pairs. (but it does mean there's only two 20 degree wide conical polar "blindspots")
By processing those streams you should be able to derive high quality depth information from the combined video streams, and given the overlap in views re-compute a 'view' from any direction.
A lot of early work was done using the streetview cameras as well to do street facing feature extraction using similar techniques but as those cameras were essentially single shot (discrete pictures over time rather than video) you end up with the "slewing" effect of moving from one spot to the next.
Presumably Google will go out and do street view with this sort of setup and get a continuous terrain option so that you can really walk around as if you were there (caveat occlusion effects)