Novel views are rendered by combining the appropriate captured rays in an efficient manner at rendering time. Although vertical distortions exist in the rendered images, they can be alleviated by depth correction. Like panaromas, concentric mosaics do not require recovering geometric and photometric scene models. Moreover, concentric mosaics provide a much richer user experience by allowing the user to move freely in a circular region and observe significant parallax and lighting changes. Compared with a Lightfield or Lumigraph, concentric mosaics have much smaller file size because only a 3D plenoptic function is constructed.
Concentric mosaics have good space and computational efficiency, and are very easy to capture.
This paper discusses a complete working system from capturing, construction, compression, to rendering of concentric mosaics from synthetic and real environments. Harry Shum, Li-Wei He. Rendering with Concentric Mosaics . The first method warps Sprites with Depth representing smooth surfaces without the gaps found in other techniques. An LDI is a view of the scene from a single input camera view, but with multiple pixels along each line of sight.