GPU Accelerated Stylistic Augmented Reality

With the introduction of programmable graphics pipeline, the highly parallel processing power of graphical processing units (GPU) is being used not only for special graphics effects but also for general purpose computation in areas such as molecular dynamics simulation, stock options pricing, and image processing. In this work, we utilize this power to increase the immersion level in an augmented reality (AR) application. To accomplish this task, the visual gap between real world and virtual objects are closed by applying non-photorealistic filtering/rendering techniques to both the real world video image and the rendered virtual object. The inherent requirement of real-time operation of AR is satisfied by implementing the mentioned techniques on GPU by using NVIDIA’s CUDA. Index Terms – non-photorealistic rendering, GPGPU, CUDA, augmented reality