Parallel Processing for Integral Imaging Pickup Using Multiple Threads

Many studies have been done on the integral imaging pickup whose objective is to get efficiently elemental images from a lens array with respect to three-dimensional (3D) objects. In the integral imaging pickup process, it is necessary to render an elemental image from each elemental lens in a lens array for 3D objects, and then to combine them into one total image. The multiple viewpoint rendering (MVR) is one of various methods for integral imaging pickup. This method, however, has the computing and rendering time problem for obtaining element images from a lot of elemental lens. In order to solve the problems, in this paper, we propose a parallel MVR (PMVR) method to generate elemental images in a parallel through distribution of elemental lenses into multiple threads simultaneously. As a result, the computation time of integral imaging using PMVR is reduced significantly rather than a sequential approach and then we showed that the PMVR is very useful.