  In this paper, we report on a parallel freeviewpoint video synthesis
algorithm that can efficiently reconstruct a high-quality 3D scene
representation of sports scenes. The proposed method focuses on a scene that is
captured by multiple synchronized cameras featuring wide-baselines. The
following strategies are introduced to accelerate the production of a
free-viewpoint video taking the improvement of visual quality into account: (1)
a sparse point cloud is reconstructed using a volumetric visual hull approach,
and an exact 3D ROI is found for each object using an efficient connected
components labeling algorithm. Next, the reconstruction of a dense point cloud
is accelerated by implementing visual hull only in the ROIs; (2) an accurate
polyhedral surface mesh is built by estimating the exact intersections between
grid cells and the visual hull; (3) the appearance of the reconstructed
presentation is reproduced in a view-dependent manner that respectively renders
the non-occluded and occluded region with the nearest camera and its
neighboring cameras. The production for volleyball and judo sequences
demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in terms of both execution time
and visual quality.
