Full Solid Angle Panoramic Viewing by Depth Image Warping on Field Programmable Gate Array

—To construct 3D virtual scenes from two-dimensional images with depth information, image warping techniques could be used. In this paper, a novel approach of cylindrical depth image warping is presented and implemented on a field programmable gate array hardware platform, which can implement a full solid angle panoramic viewing. By the approach, we use a virtual projective cylindrical camera model. The scene to render is firstly projected onto the surface of a cylinder with perspective projection for the top and bottom view and parallel projection for the side view respectively. Both color and depth images are captured after projection. Using the projective cylindrical reference images as the source, we employ a two-pass rendering process to generate new views of the 3D scene through a horizontal and vertical pre-warping followed by standard texture mapping. By taking the parallelism and reconfigurability of hardware, the algorithm is optimized for the architecture of circuit and well designed for memory management. Experimental results show that an improved rendering speed with generation of good quality images could be achieved on the hardware platform.