An Approach on Hardware Design for Computational Photography Applications Based on Light Field Refocusing Algorithm

This paper describes the performance analysis of the light field refocusing algorithm running on different hardware specifications, including the Intel Pentium 4, SSE2(Streaming SIMD Extensions), GPU, and also Cell Broadband Engine. The hardware chosen has unique features, making it interesting to compare their performance on such an application with each other, and how much advantage or disadvantage each one has over others. By doing so, we attempt to clarify the pros and cons of each hardware design in its capability of handling computational intensive image processing applications. The execution time is used as the main metric.