Abstract: A depth image constructed with a pinhole camera suffers from disocclusion errors: even a minimal viewpoint translation exposes samples not visible from the original viewpoint. The conventional solution to employ additional depth images is inefficient. A recent approach is to render the depth image with an occlusion camera, a non-pinhole that also gathers samples not seen from the reference viewpoint but needed for nearby viewpoints.

We introduce the epipolar occlusion camera (EOC), which overcomes disadvantages of earlier occlusion cameras. An EOC is a non-pinhole which gathers samples of a 3D scene visible from a segment of viewpoints. The EOC is constructed by expressing the disocclusion events in the (2D) image as the sum of independent disocclusion events along (1D) epipolar lines. The EOC image has a single layer, is non-redundant, and is constructed efficiently by directly rendering the 3D scene with the EOC in feed-forward fashion, through projection followed by rasterization.