A novel pixel router for large-scale multi-projector displays

This paper describes a newly developed hardware used in multi-projector displays built with a network of PCs, commodity graphics accelerators, multiple projectors, cameras, and large-scale screens. In order to completely remove the photometric seams or geometric discontinuities on projector boundaries in such a multi-projector display, the frame-buffer content for each projector has to be warped and attenuated properly. So the system must include a high-performance and scalable pixel routing subsystem in order to create seamless imagery. Here we propose to develop a flexible pixel router to solve this problem. Our router is capable of performing an arbitrary mapping of pixels from any input frame to any output frame, and executing typical composition operations at the same time. The main challenge of developing the hardware is to maintain the refresh rate. We analyse hardware pixel routing for multi-projector displays. We demonstrate the construction of large-scale multi-projector display systems using this flexible pixel router that bridges the image generator and the projectors. We also present an initial hardware prototype and some preliminary results in the hardware development. Experimental results show that our approach is both feasible and robust.