GPU-Based Barrel Distortion Correction for Acceleration

Geometric correction is a practical and effective barrel distortion correction method. It mainly consists of two stages: the first stage is to take coordinates mapping from distortion image to correction image, the second stage is bilinear interpolation. It involves a certain amount of calculation, and the larger the image is, the more the quantity of calculation is. What´s more, the processing speed of geometric correction implemented on central processing unit (CPU) can´t meet the need of high-speed in real-time application fields. Compared with serial processing pipeline of CPU, graphics processing unit (GPU) has special parallel processing pipeline which is suitable and fast for mass data calculation in parallel. Therefore, it can provide an implementation of geometric correction on GPU with considerable acceleration effect. The paper proposes an implementation of geometric correction on GPU by using open graphics library (OpenGL) and graphics library shading language (GLSL) for portability. The experiment results show that the full execution performance of the implementation on GPU is over 190 times speedup of that completely on CPU at most, which obtains a high-speed processing effect.