Architecture of a low latency image rectification engine for stereoscopic 3D HDTV processing

The emerging market of digital 3-D film productions in HD resolution leads to the need for high-quality equipment in the production chain. The incoming video streams of the two cameras require an image rectification due to unavoidable misalignments within the stereoscopic camera setup. This rectification can either take place in postprocessing of the recorded material or it can be applied in real time during the shooting. Especially in the case of streaming and recording of live events, real-time processing is necessary and, additionally, the system has to provide a very low latency. We present a hardware image rectification engine, which supports the processing of stereo high-definition serial digital interfaces video streams with up to 1080p30 video with a latency below 1 ms. The image rectification engines for the two channels are implemented on two Altera Stratix III EP3SL340 running at 74.25 MHz. They can be controlled by the stereoscopy analysis software, which calculates the parameters required for the image rectification at runtime.