Image Rectification Engine for Stereoscopic 3D HDTV Processing

Image rectification Unit

The emerging market of digital 3D film productions in HD resolution leads to the need for high quality equipment in the production chain. The incoming video streams of the two cameras require an image rectification due to unavoidable misalignments within the stereoscopic camera setup. This rectification can either take place in the postprocessing of the recorded material or it can be applied in real-time during the shooting. Especially in case of streaming and recording of live events real-time processing is necessary and additionally the system has to provide a very low latency. We've developed a hardware image rectification engine, which supports the processing of stereo HD-SDI video streams with up to 1080p30 video with a latency below 1ms. The image rectification engines for the two channels are implemented on two Altera Stratix III EP3SL340 running at 74.25 MHz. They are controlled by the stereoscopy analysis software STAN, which calculates the parameters required for the image rectification at run-time.

HEP-II prototyping platform used for the implementation of the image rectification unit

Reference

Heiko Hübert, Benno Stabernack, and Frederik Zilly:
Architecture of a Low Latency Image Rectification Engine for Stereoscopic 3D HDTV Processing, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Videotechnology, 2012.