Real-time free viewpoint synthesis using three-camera disparity estimation hardware

The recent development of high-quality free viewpoint synthesis algorithms and their implementations allows to realize glasses-free 3D perception. Although many algorithms have been developed in this domain, the real-time hardware realization of a free viewpoint synthesis for real-world images is challenging due to its high computational load and memory bandwidth requirements. In this paper, the first real-time high-resolution free viewpoint synthesis hardware utilizing three-camera disparity estimation is presented. The proposed hardware generates high-quality free viewpoint video at 55 frames per second using a Virtex-7 FPGA at a 1024×768 XGA video resolution for any horizontally-aligned arbitrary camera positioned between the leftmost and rightmost physical cameras.