Stereographic Depth Mapping on an FPGA

Stereographic Depth Mapping on an FPGA

Three-dimensional visual perception is becoming ever more ubiquitous with the rise of stereoscopic television and computer monitors, as well as 3-D cinema. With the addition of hardware-based depth information in an image, this technology can open up to a wide variety of practical applications. One example can be an electronic musical instrument in which the pitch or tone of the note played is dependent upon how far away the string or bar is placed with respect to a depth camera. We already experience some of the exciting applications with the recent release of the Microsoft Kinect. However, it still remains that the depth processing and computation occurs in software of the Xbox 360 instead of hardware. Our aim is to design a very efficient and cost-effective real-time video depth camera using two identical cameras entirely processed in hardware. It is understood that the hardware resources are limited for this project, so we aim to provide the highest resolution and depth image quality while satisfying the limits in logic elements in our DE2 Altera Field Programmable Gate Array.