high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Shape Diameter Function (SDF) is a scalar function that expresses a measure of the diameter of the object’s volume in the neighborhood of each point on the surface on an input mesh. It is fundamental in many applications in computer graphics used for consistent mesh partitioning and skeletonization. The algorithm sends several rays inside a cone centered around the point’s inward-normal direction and measures the distance at the point of intersection. We have implemented the original algorithm and further extended it on GPU by parallelizing the ray casting process using OpenCL. We have also generalized the algorithm to support non-manifold meshes. The algorithm shows great speedup in terms of timing when compared with the CPU based implementation.