Performance considerations for a real-time integral image camera in ray tracing environments

Abstract

Integral Imaging is a highly promising technique for delivering full parallax autostereoscopic images. A straight-forward approach for producing high quality photorealistic Integral Images or Integral Image sequences is the use of Ray-Tracing techniques. However, Ray-Tracing tasks are time consuming and in most cases scene renderings greatly deviate from performing in real time. In this work, we describe an Integral Image specific benchmarking procedure that allows accurate rendering performance evaluation of different parts of the Ray-Tracing process. A correlation based method is used to characterize the Integral Image complexity and finally calculate its actual complexity. Moreover, a number of issues are exposed that should be taken into account in real-time Integral Imaging applications. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.