Real-time free-viewpoint DIBR on GPUs for large base-line multi-view 3DTV videos

GPUs are ample utilized for their parallel processing capabilities and are also interesting in the area of 3D image processing where computational demanding tasks are essential. We concentrate particularly on free-view 3DTV applications, based on image warping to the new view and image artifact reduction techniques. In this paper, we report on the implementation of an efficient free-viewpoint DIBR algorithm with an off-the-shelf GPU, which can be readily integrated into future 3DTV systems. For exploiting maximal parallelism, we have mapped the processing of each pixel to a separate thread and grouped multiple threads to larger blocks as much as possible. 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.