Focus measurement on programmable graphics hardware for all in-focus rendering from light fields

Abstract

This paper deals with a method for interactive rendering of photorealistic images, which is a fundamental technology in the field of virtual reality. Since the latest graphics processing units (GPUs) are programmable, they are expected to be useful for various applications including numerical computation and image processing. This paper proposes a method for focus measurement on light field rendering using a GPU as a fast processing unit for image processing and image-based rendering. It is confirmed that the proposed method enables interactive all in-focus rendering from light fields. This is because the latest DirectX 9 generation GPUs are much faster than CPUs in solving optimization problems, and a GPU implementation can eliminate the latency for data transmission between video memory and system memory. Experimental results show that the GPU implementation outperforms its CPU implementation.