Patent ID: 7194125

Claim:
A method for rendering a model of a 3D object, comprising: generating a polygon model of the 3D object, each polygon having a plurality of vertices; acquiring a set of digitized RGB α input images of the object; locating, for each vertex of the polygon model, a set of visible views; selecting from the set of visible views, for each vertex of the polygon model, a set of closest views for a viewing direction; projecting normalized viewing vectors of the visible views onto a tangential plane having a surface normal at each vertex; triangulating the projected vectors 2D Delaunay triangulation so that the closest views for the viewing direction are particular vertices of a Delaunay triangle that project into the viewing direction; determining blending weights for each closest view; rendering each polygon in the model into an output image, the rendering performed by blending images of the set of input images corresponding to the set of closest views of each vertex of the polygon using the blending weights, and wherein the rendering uses view-dependent texture mapping.