High-Quality Real-Time Depth-Image-Based-Rendering

With depth sensors becoming more and more common, and applications with varying viewpoints (like e.g. virtual reality) becoming more and more popular, there is a growing demand for real-time depth-image-based-rendering algorithms that reach a high quality. Starting from a quality-wise top performing depth-image-based-renderer, we develop a real-time version. Despite reaching a high quality as well, the new OpenGL-based renderer decreases runtime by (at least) 2 magnitudes. This was made possible by discovering similarities between forward-based and mesh-based rendering, which enable us to remove the common parallelization bottleneck of competing memory access, and facilitated by the implementation of accurate yet fast algorithms for the different parts of the rendering pipeline. We evaluated the proposed renderer using a publicly available dataset with ground-truth depth and camera data, that contains both rapid camera movements and rotations as well as complex scenes and is therefore challenging to project accurately