Real-time 3D depth generation for stereoscopic video applications with thread-level superscalar-pipeline parallelization

We propose a low-complexity algorithm for stereoscopic video applications that generates a high-quality 3D image depth map from a single 2D image. Based on their characteristics, 2D images are classified into one of three categories before being processed by the proposed low-complexity algorithm to generate corresponding depth maps. We also extend the 3D depth algorithm to construct a parallel 3D video system. A thread-level superscalar-pipelining approach is developed to parallelize the 3D video system. Experimental results for HD1080 resolution images demonstrate that the algorithm can generate high-quality depth maps with an average reduction in the computational complexity of 98.2 % compared with a conventional algorithm. The parallel 3D video system can achieve a processing speed of 63.66 fps for HD720 resolution video.