Accelerating Depth Image-Based Rendering Using GPU.

In this paper, we propose a practical method for hardware-accelerated rendering of the depth image-based representation (DIBR) object, which is defined in MPEG-4 Animation Framework eXtension (AFX). The proposed method overcomes the drawbacks of the conventional rendering, i.e. it is slow since it is hardly assisted by graphics hardware and surface lighting is static. Utilizing the new features of modern graphic processing unit (GPU) and programmable shader support, we develop an efficient hardware-accelerated rendering algorithm of depth image-based 3D object. Surface rendering in response of varying illumination is performed inside the vertex shader while adaptive point splatting is performed inside the fragment shader. Experimental results show that the rendering speed increases considerably compared with the software-based rendering and the conventional OpenGL-based rendering method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]