Proposed Graphics Processing Unit Implementation Research Articles

GPU based parallel framework for receiver coil sensitivity estimation in SENSE reconstruction

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) uses non-ionizing radiations and is safer as compared to CT and X-ray imaging. MRI is broadly used around the globe for medical diagnostics. One main limitation of MRI is its long data acquisition time. Parallel MRI (pMRI) was introduced in late 1990's to reduce the MRI data acquisition time. In pMRI, data is acquired by under-sampling the Phase Encoding (PE) steps which introduces aliasing artefacts in the MR images. SENSitivity Encoding (SENSE) is a pMRI based method that reconstructs fully sampled MR image from the acquired under-sampled data using the sensitivity information of receiver coils. In SENSE, precise estimation of the receiver coil sensitivity maps is vital to obtain good quality images. Eigen-value method (a recently proposed method in literature for the estimation of receiver coil sensitivity information) does not require a pre-scan image unlike other conventional methods of sensitivity estimation. However, Eigen-value method is computationally intensive and takes a significant amount of time to estimate the receiver coil sensitivity maps. This work proposes a parallel framework for Eigen-value method of receiver coil sensitivity estimation that exploits its inherent parallelism using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We evaluated the performance of the proposed algorithm on in-vivo and simulated MRI datasets (i.e. human head and simulated phantom datasets) with Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Artefact Power (AP) as evaluation metrics. The results show that the proposed GPU implementation reduces the execution time of Eigen-value method of receiver coil sensitivity estimation (providing up to 30 times speed up in our experiments) without degrading the quality of the reconstructed image.

Multiunmanned Aerial Vehicle Path Planner on Graphics Processing Unit

Using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) improves the efficiency of reconnaissance, surveillance, and search and rescue missions. This article presents a path-planning software for a team of UAVs utilizing graphics processing units (GPUs). The UAVs are tasked to visit multiple points of interest (POIs) in a 3-D environment, and the software finds an optimized solution that assigns the POIs to the UAVs, selects the order in which the POIs are visited, and calculates the paths between the POIs. The software uses a multistep approach using a single-source-shortest-path algorithm to find the optimal paths between all combinations of POIs followed by a genetic algorithm to solve the multitraveling salesperson problem. The algorithm can minimize distance, time, or energy consumption depending on the setting selected by the user. The proposed GPU implementation is tested on eight different maps from around the world and executes in just 0.6 s, a 48.3× speedup compared to a sequential execution on CPU. This performance improvement is a real asset in a mission-changing environment.

MIGS-GPU: Microarray Image Gridding and Segmentation on the GPU.

Complementary DNA (cDNA) microarray is a powerful tool for simultaneously studying the expression level of thousands of genes. Nevertheless, the analysis of microarray images remains an arduous and challenging task due to the poor quality of the images that often suffer from noise, artifacts, and uneven background. In this study, the MIGS-GPU [Microarray Image Gridding and Segmentation on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)] software for gridding and segmenting microarray images is presented. MIGS-GPU's computations are performed on the GPU by means of the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) in order to achieve fast performance and increase the utilization of available system resources. Evaluation on both real and synthetic cDNA microarray images showed that MIGS-GPU provides better performance than state-of-the-art alternatives, while the proposed GPU implementation achieves significantly lower computational times compared to the respective CPU approaches. Consequently, MIGS-GPU can be an advantageous and useful tool for biomedical laboratories, offering a user-friendly interface that requires minimum input in order to run.

Accelerating digital halftoning using the local exhaustive search on the GPU

SummaryDigital halftoning is an important process to convert a grayscale image into a binary image with black and white pixels. Local exhaustive search‐based halftoning is one of the halftoning methods that can generate high‐quality binary images. However, considering the computing time, it is not realistic for most applications. As a first contribution, this paper proposes a graphics processing unit (GPU) implementation for digital halftoning employing local exhaustive search to produce high‐quality binary images. Programming issues of the GPU architecture have been carefully assessed for implementing the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed GPU implementation on NVIDIA (Santa Clara, CA, USA) GeForce GTX TITAN X attains a speed‐up factor of up to 48 over a CPU implementation. Our second contribution is a GPU implementation for cluster‐dot halftoning tailored for local exhaustive search. This implementation attains a speed‐up factor of 92 over a sequential CPU implementation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Real-time implementation of an adaptive simultaneous dynamic range compression and local contrast enhancement algorithm on a GPU

Dynamic range compression is a fundamental function required in digital video cameras and display monitors to improve the visual appeal of color images. This paper presents a real-time implementation of an algorithm for adaptive dynamic range compression and contrast enhancement on a graphics processing unit (GPU). To achieve this, we first designed an adaptive intensity transfer function to handle the enhancement of standard-dynamic-range (8 bits/channel) images with both low- and high-intensity. The proposed algorithm then combines the intensity transfer function with an existing simultaneous dynamic range compression and local contrast enhancement (SDRCLCE) algorithm for the simultaneous compression of dynamic range and enhancement of local contrast. To reach real-time performance in processing high-resolution color images, the proposed algorithm is implemented using an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti GPU based on NVIDIA’s Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) parallel programming running on a 3.33 GHz Intel Core i5-661 CPU. Compared with a LUT-accelerated implementation, the proposed GPU implementation was shown to accelerate the processing of 1024 × 1024 color images by 11.1 times and color images of 4096 × 4096 pixels by 7.5 times, including the cost of memory copy between the host and device.

GPU를 이용한 다양한 해상도의 비디오기반 실시간 화재감지 방법 구현 및 성능평가

본 논문에서는 기존에 많이 사용되는 복잡한 4단계 화재 감지 알고리즘의 성능을 향상시키기 위해 그래픽스 처리 장치 (GPU)를 이용한 효율적인 병렬 구현 방법을 제안하였고 성능을 분석하였다. 또한 현재 많이 사용되고 있는 7가지 서로 다른 해상도 (QVGA, VGA, SVGA, XGA, SXGA+, UXGA, QXGA)의 비디오를 입력으로 하여 성능을 분석하였다. 더불어 각 해상도별 GPU 기반 실행시간과 고성능 CPU에서의 실행시간을 비교 분석하였다. 각 해상도의 5가지 화재 및 비 화재 비디오를 이용하여 모의 실험한 결과, GPU는 CPU보다 실행시간에서 우수한 성능을 보이는 동시에 FULL HD급의 높은 해상도인 UXGA 영상에서도 프레임 당 25.11ms의 실행시간이 소요되어 초당 30 프레임의 실시간 처리가 가능함을 보였다. In this paper, we propose an efficient parallel implementation method of a widely used complex four-stage fire detection algorithm using a graphics processing unit (GPU) to improve the performance of the algorithm and analyze the performance of the parallel implementation method. In addition, we use seven different resolution videos (QVGA, VGA, SVGA, XGA, SXGA+, UXGA, QXGA) as inputs of the four-stage fire detection algorithm. Moreover, we compare the performance of the GPU-based approach with that of the CPU implementation for each different resolution video. Experimental results using five different fire videos with seven different resolutions indicate that the execution time of the proposed GPU implementation outperforms that of the CPU implementation in terms of execution time and takes a 25.11ms per frame for the UXGA resolution video, satisfying real-time processing (30 frames per second, 30fps) of the fire detection algorithm.

Accelerating computation of Euclidean distance map using the GPU with efficient memory access

Recent graphics processing units (GPUs), which have many processing units, can be used for general purpose parallel computation. To utilise the powerful computing ability, GPUs are widely used for general purpose processing. Since GPUs have very high memory bandwidth, the performance of GPUs greatly depends on memory access. The main contribution of this paper is to present a GPU implementation of computing Euclidean distance map (EDM) with efficient memory access. Given a two-dimensional (2D) binary image, EDM is a 2D array of the same size such that each element stores the Euclidean distance to the nearest black pixel. In the proposed GPU implementation, we have considered many programming issues of the GPU system such as coalesced access of global memory and shared memory bank conflicts, and so on. To be concrete, by transposing 2D arrays, which are temporal data stored in the global memory, with the shared memory, the main access from/to the global memory enables to be performed by coalesced access. In practice, we have implemented our parallel algorithm in the following three modern GPU systems: Tesla C1060, GTX 480 and GTX 580. The experimental results have shown that, for an input binary image with size of 9216 × 9216, our implementation can achieve a speedup factor of 54 over the sequential algorithm implementation.

GPU Implementation of an Automatic Target Detection and Classification Algorithm for Hyperspectral Image Analysis

The detection of (moving or static) targets in remotely sensed hyperspectral images often requires real-time responses for swift decisions that depend upon high computing performance of algorithm analysis. The automatic target detection and classification algorithm (ATDCA) has been widely used for this purpose. In this letter, we develop several optimizations for accelerating the computational performance of ATDCA. The first one focuses on the use of the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization method instead of the orthogonal projection process adopted by the classic algorithm. The second one is focused on the development of a new implementation of the algorithm on commodity graphics processing units (GPUs). The proposed GPU implementation properly exploits the GPU architecture at low level, including shared memory, and provides coalesced accesses to memory that lead to very significant speedup factors, thus taking full advantage of the computational power of GPUs. The GPU implementation is specifically tailored to hyperspectral imagery and the special characteristics of this kind of data, achieving real-time performance of ATDCA for the first time in the literature. The proposed optimizations are evaluated not only in terms of target detection accuracy but also in terms of computational performance using two different GPU architectures by NVIDIA: Tesla C1060 and GeForce GTX 580, taking advantage of the performance of operations in single-precision floating point. Experiments are conducted using hyperspectral data sets collected by three different hyperspectral imaging instruments. These results reveal considerable acceleration factors while retaining the same target detection accuracy for the algorithm.

GPGPU implementation of growing neural gas: Application to 3D scene reconstruction

Self-organising neural models have the ability to provide a good representation of the input space. In particular the Growing Neural Gas (GNG) is a suitable model because of its flexibility, rapid adaptation and excellent quality of representation. However, this type of learning is time-consuming, especially for high-dimensional input data. Since real applications often work under time constraints, it is necessary to adapt the learning process in order to complete it in a predefined time. This paper proposes a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) parallel implementation of the GNG with Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). In contrast to existing algorithms, the proposed GPU implementation allows the acceleration of the learning process keeping a good quality of representation. Comparative experiments using iterative, parallel and hybrid implementations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of CUDA implementation. The results show that GNG learning with the proposed implementation achieves a speed-up of 6× compared with the single-threaded CPU implementation. GPU implementation has also been applied to a real application with time constraints: acceleration of 3D scene reconstruction for egomotion, in order to validate the proposal.