GPU-accelerated time-of-flight super-resolution for image-guided surgery

Abstract

In the field of image-guided surgery, Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors are of interest due to their fast acquisition of 3-D surfaces. However, the poor signal-to-noise ratio and low spatial resolution of today’s ToF sensors require preprocessing of the acquired range data. Super-resolution is a technique for image restoration and resolution enhancement by utilizing information from successive raw frames of an image sequence. We propose a super-resolution framework using the graphics processing unit. Our framework enables interactive frame rates, computing an upsampled image from 10 noisy frames of 200×200 px with an upsampling factor of 2 in 109ms. The root-mean-square error of the super-resolved surface with respect to ground truth data is improved by more than 20% relative to a single raw frame.