Real-time free-viewpoint DIBR on GPUs for 3DTV systems

Multi-view 3D may succeed stereo 3DTV in multimedia and TV applications. To this end, the MPEG committee has installed a special task force to establish a standard for multi-view 3D coding. One focal point of our research work is on an efficient implementation of the rendering part of such a multi-view 3D system, because it is a computationally expensive task and it determines the final reconstructing quality. Our free-viewpoint DIBR algorithm is implemented with an off-the-shelf GPU that can be integrated in advanced 3DTV systems. We present the principal steps of a representative free-viewpoint DIBR and show the key differences between the reference software and our GPU implementation. One of those differences is the joint execution of signal processing blocks to share memory usage. Using a combination of the highly parallel programming architecture CUDA and a graphics API, we have achieved a real-time performance operating on 1080p HD multi-view video with a rendering quality that is comparable to the software implementation.