Real-time 2D parallel windowed Fourier transform for fringe pattern analysis using Graphics Processing Unit

In optical interferometers, fringe projection systems, and synthetic aperture radars, fringe patterns are common outcomes and usually degraded by unavoidable noises. The presence of noises makes the phase extraction and phase unwrapping challenging. Windowed Fourier transform (WFT) based algorithms have been proven to be effective for fringe pattern analysis to various applications. However, the WFT-based algorithms are computationally expensive, prohibiting them from real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a fast parallel WFT-based library using graphics processing units and computer unified device architecture. Real-time WFT-based algorithms are achieved with 4 frames per second in processing 256 x 256 fringe patterns. Up to 132 x speedup is obtained for WFT-based algorithms using NVIDIA GTX295 graphics card than sequential C in quad-core 2.5GHz Intel(R)Xeon(R) CPU E5420. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America