VECW: A Virtual Environment Construction and Walkthrough System

In order to represent real world precisely，the hybrid approach using geometric modeling and image-based rendering is promising．Based on the existing algorithms of creating geometric model of buildings with texture mapping from pictures，this paper presents a virtual environment construction and walkthrough system， named VECW． The system supports modeling from photographs and accepts the common model data form of Wavefront．Using the system，users can edit the positions and material properties of models in the scene，and also the lighting environment．Especially，it can save the scene data as VRML file．This system helps to construct a virtual scene conveniently and walkthrough it．Examples illustrate the efficiency of the system．