This paper presents a new data structure, called stick textures, to give a continuous and compact 3D representation of the scene displayed in depth images. A stick texture is constructed for each pixel of a depth image, composed of the interpolated pixels to fill the gaps between the pixel and its neighbour pixels covered by a same continuous surface. Thus, rendering sticks instead of pixels can save operations on hole-filling for acceleration, and produce high quality novel images with 3D details and view motion parallax displayed very well. In addition, stick textures are always short, and every stick texture can be rendered as a pixel. Therefore, stick textures have not a high storage requirement, and they can be easily integrated with existing image-based rendering methods to achieve high rendering efficiency, e.g., using GPUs for acceleration and conveniently handling large-scale scenes, even the scenes with multi-layered objects. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of stick textures in image quality, rendering speed and storage requirement. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.