GPU-based Video Motion Magnification

Video motion magnification (VMM) allows people see otherwise not visible subtle changes in surrounding world. VMM is also capable of hiding them with a modified version of the algorithm. It is possible to magnify motion related to breathing of patients in hospital to observe it or extinguish it and extract other information from stabilized image sequence for example blood flow. In both cases we would like to perform calculations in real time. Unfortunately, the VMM algorithm requires a great amount of computing power. In the article we suggest that VMM algorithm can be parallelized (each thread processes one pixel) and in order to prove that we implemented the algorithm on GPU using CUDA technology. CPU is used only to grab, write, display frame and schedule work for GPU. Each GPU kernel performs spatial decomposition, reconstruction and motion amplification. In this work we presented approach that achieves a significant speedup over existing methods and allow to VMM process video in real-time. This solution can be used as preprocessing for other algorithms in more complex systems or can find application wherever real time motion magnification would be useful. It is worth to mention that the implementation runs on most modern desktops and laptops compatible with CUDA technology.