Real-time 3D video synthesis from binocular capture system based on commodity graphic hardware

In this paper, a real-time 3D video synthesis method suitable for implementation on commodity graphic hardware is presented. The system consists of pre-calibrated binocular stereo cameras and an NVIDIA GeForce 8 Series graphic card. Recently, most research has focused on improving the quality of depth maps, which is usually time-consuming and unsuitable for real-time reconstruction. In our method, we combine a plane-sweeping algorithm with view synthesis, and thus the new views between the captured images can be real-time generated without generating the intermediate depth map. The Programmable Fragment Shader technology is used to accelerate the process of Sum-of-Square-Difference (SSD) dissimilarity measure of the correlation pixels and the final color calculation. Experimental results show that our method can efficiently implement the real-time 3D view synthesis.