Compressed look-up-table based real-time rectification hardware

Stereo image rectification is a pre-processing step of disparity estimation intended to remove image distortions and to enable stereo matching along an epipolar line. A real-time disparity estimation system needs to perform real-time rectification which requires solving the models of lens distortions, image translations and rotations. Look-up-table based rectification algorithms allow image rectification without demanding high complexity operations. However, they require an external memory to store large size look-up-tables. In this work, we present an intermediate solution that compresses the rectification information to fit the look-up-table into the on-chip memory of a Virtex-5 FPGA. The low-complexity decompression process requires a negligible amount of hardware resources for its real-time implementation. The proposed image rectification hardware consumes 0.28% of the DFF and 0.32% of the LUT resources of the Virtex-5 XCUVP-110T FPGA, it can process 347 frames per second for a 1024×768 pixels image resolution, and it does not need the availability of an external memory.