Photo Based Walkthrough Using Prefetch and Caching Strategies

CITRA2007, Kuching Sarawak, July 10-July 12th 2007 (ISBN 983-92576-6-8)

‘Photo Based Walkthrough’ is a real
time walkthrough system in a virtual
environment constructed from photo images.
Since actual photographs are used, the virtual
environment can achieve unparalleled realism.
On the other hand, geometry-based rendering
system is very time consuming to be constructed
especially for a large environment with complex
lighting and visual effects. This research was
carried out by creating an IBR prototype using
OpenGL and C++ programming language. A
large amount of digital photographs were
captured and stored in a secondary storage. The
virtual scene is constructed using retrieval
algorithms that take user coordinates into
consideration. Pre-fetch and caching algorithms
were numerically analyzed to test the viability to
achieve quick rendering by caching the
appropriate images into the main memory
before display.