Very High Frame Rate Volumetric Integration of Depth Images on Mobile Devices

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 21; no. 11; pp. 1241 - 1250
• Main Authors: Kahler, Olaf, Prisacariu, Victor Adrian, Ren, Carl Yuheng, Xin Sun, Torr, Philip, Murray, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 15.11.2015
• Subjects: 3D modelling; Arrays; camera tracking; Cameras; Interpolation; Kinect; mobile devices; real-time; Rendering (computer graphics); Resource management; Solid modeling; Three-dimensional displays; volumetric; Kinect; mobile devices; 3D modelling; real-time; camera tracking; volumetric
• ISSN: 1077-2626; 1941-0506; 1941-0506
• DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2015.2459891

Volumetric methods provide efficient, flexible and simple ways of integrating multiple depth images into a full 3D model. They provide dense and photorealistic 3D reconstructions, and parallelised implementations on GPUs achieve real-time performance on modern graphics hardware. To run such methods on mobile devices, providing users with freedom of movement and instantaneous reconstruction feedback, remains challenging however. In this paper we present a range of modifications to existing volumetric integration methods based on voxel block hashing, considerably improving their performance and making them applicable to tablet computer applications. We present (i) optimisations for the basic data structure, and its allocation and integration; (ii) a highly optimised raycasting pipeline; and (iii) extensions to the camera tracker to incorporate IMU data. In total, our system thus achieves frame rates up 47 Hz on a Nvidia Shield Tablet and 910 Hz on a Nvidia GTX Titan XGPU, or even beyond 1.1 kHz without visualisation.