Simple and Fast Parallel Algorithms for the Voronoi Map and the Euclidean Distance Map, with GPU Implementations

Abstract

The complete Voronoi map of a binary image with black and white pixels is a matrix of the same size such that each element is the closest black pixel of the corresponding pixel. The complete Voronoi map visualizes the influence region of each black pixel. However, each region may not be connected due to exclave pixels. The connected Voronoi map is a modification of the complete Voronoi map so that all regions are connected. The Euclidean distance map of a binary image is a matrix, in which each element is the distance to the closest black pixel. It has many applications of image processing such as dilation, erosion, blurring effects, skeletonization and matching. The main contribution of this paper is to present simple and fast parallel algorithms for computing the complete/connected Voronoi maps and the Euclidean distance map and implement them in the GPU. Our parallel algorithm first computes the mixed Voronoi map, which is a mixture of the complete and connected Voronoi maps, and then converts it into the complete/connected Voronoi by exposing/hiding all exclave pixels. After that, the complete Voronoi map is converted into the Euclidean distance map by computing the distance to the closest black pixel for every pixel in an obvious way. The experimental results on GeForce GTX~1080 GPU show that the computing time for these conversions is relatively small. The throughput of our GPU implementation for computing the Euclidean distance maps of 2K × 2K binary images is up to 2.08 times larger than the previously published best GPU implementation, and up to 172 times larger than CPU implementation using Intel Core i7-4790.