Eurographics '95 Tutorial: Closing the Gap: From Computer Vision to Virtual Reality

Our target is to present the complete image analysis/synthesis-pipeline in the widest sense: Our pipeline is typical for most computer graphics and engineering applications and has four major stages: Image acquisition & Processing, Computer Vision, Computer Graphics & Visualization, and Virtual Reality. This scheme covers all processing stations from sensing the world, generating models, visualizing them on the screen and interacting with them in an advanced way using virtual environments. Although traditionally these stages have been regarded to be almost independent from each other and have been envolving more or less independent from one another, we want to demonstrate that they can be regarded to be sub-stages of a homogeneous process. The validity of the approach will be demonstrated with three applications: reconstruction of geometry from a sequence of images, reconstruction and visualization of the coronary heart vessels from angiograms, and an arthroscopy simulator for medical training using VR methods.