Intel Corporation
APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR PERFORMING NON-LOCAL MEANS FILTERING USING MOTION ESTIMATION CIRCUITRY OF A GRAPHICS PROCESSOR

Abstract:

Apparatus and method for non-local means filtering using a media processing block of a graphics processor. For example, one embodiment of a processor comprises: ray tracing circuitry to execute a first set of one or more commands to traverse rays through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) to identify BVH nodes and/or primitives intersected by the ray; shader execution circuitry to execute one or more shaders responsive to a second set of one or more commands to render a sequence of image frames based on the BVH nodes and/or primitives intersected by the ray; and a media processor comprising motion estimation circuitry to execute a third set of one or more commands to perform non-local means filtering to remove noise from the sequence of image frames based on a mean pixel value collected across the sequence of image frames.