Peek-in-the-Pic: Flying Through Architectural Scenes From a Single Image*

Abstract

Many casually taken tourist photographs comprise of architectural objects like houses, buildings, etc. Reconstructing such 3D scenes captured in a single photograph is a very challenging problem. We propose a novel approach to reconstruct such architectural scenes with minimal and simple user interaction, with the goal of providing 3D navigational capability to an image rather than acquiring accurate geometric detail. Our system, Peek-in-the-Pic, is based on a sketch-based geometry reconstruction paradigm. Given an image, the user simply traces out objects from it. Our system regards these as perspective line drawings, automatically completes them and reconstructs geometry from them. We make basic assumptions about the structure of traced objects and provide simple gestures for placing additional constraints. We also provide a simple sketching tool to progressively complete parts of the reconstructed buildings that are not visible in the image and cannot be automatically completed. Finally, we fill holes created in the original image when reconstructed buildings are removed from it, by automatic texture synthesis. Users can spend more time using interactive texture synthesis for further refining the image. Thus, instead of looking at flat images, a user can fly through them after some simple processing. Minimal manual work, ease of use and interactivity are the salient features of our approach.