Photo Based Walkthrough Using Prefetch and Caching Strategies

‘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.