Scene tunnels for seamless virtual tour
This paper proposes a visual representation named scene tunnel to archive and visualize urban scenes for Internet based virtual tour. We scan cityscapes using multiple cameras on a vehicle that moves along streets, and generate scene archive more complete than a route panorama. The scene tunnel can cover high architectures and various object aspects. It contains much less data than video, which is suitable for image transmission and rendering over the Internet. It has a uniformed resolution along the camera path and provides continuous views for virtual traversing of a real city. We have developed image acquisition methods from slit setting, view scanning, to image integration. We have also achieved city visualization with scene tunnels on the Internet by transforming view, streaming data, and providing interactions.