Parallel high resolution real-time Visual Hull on GPU

In this paper we present an efficient high resolution image based visual hull (IBVH) algorithm that entirely runs in real-time on a single consumer graphics card. The target application is a real-time 3D video conferencing system. One major contribution of this paper is a novel caching strategy for the reduction of line segment intersection tests. In contrast to existing approaches, it additionally allows us to pre-select a close estimation of the set of relevant pixels in the desired view. Based on this, we obtain a significant computational speedup, especially for high resolutions. Further, we propose an efficient way to use IBVH for the generation of voxel equivalent 3D models. We compare our techniques in terms of resolution and runtime with state of the art real-time multi GPU voxel based approaches. Our experiments show that we achieve a speed-up by a factor of five and more for high resolutions.