Real-time correction of wide-angle lens distortion for images with GPU computing

Wide-angle lens provides a broad field of view which benefits some applications, such as video surveillance or endoscopic imaging. However, it also induces lens distortion, especially radial distortion, which may impede further video analysis or perceptual interpretation. For some applications, such as minimally invasive surgery and visual surveillance, real-time correction of image distortion is required. Traditional CPU-centric machines are difficult to achieve the requirement of real-time computation because of a large amount of computation. In this paper, we propose to achieve real-time correction of wide-angle lens distortion of images on several target platforms. In the GPGPU platform, we achieve real-time correction at full-HD resolution by using CUDA. For middle-end devices, an error-controllable mesh is used and the system is implemented by industry standard, OpenGL. We also implement it with OpenGL ES on embedded GPUs for mobile devices. Experiments show using our error-controllable mesh greatly outperforms those using regularly downsampled meshes.