A low-cost 3D human interface device using GPU-based optical flow algorithms

Except for a few cases, nowadays it is very common to find a camera embedded in a consumer grade laptop, notebook, mobile internet device (MID), mobile phone or handheld game console. Some of them also have a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) to handle 3D graphics and other related tasks. This trend will probably continue in the next future and the pair camera+GPU will be more and more frequent in the market. Because of this, the proposal of this work is to use these resources in order to build a low-cost software-based 3D Human Interface Device (3D HID) able to run in this kind of devices, in real time without degrading the overall performance. This is achieved implementing a parallel version of an existing Optical Flow Algorithm that runs fully in the GPU without using it at full power. In this way, usual graphic processes coexist with Optical Flow computations. To the best of author’s knowledge, this approach (a software-based 3D HID that runs fully in a GPU) is not found in academic research nor in commercial products prototypes. Indeed, this is the salient contribution of this paper. The performance of the proposal is good enough to achieve real time in low grade computers.