Orders-of-magnitude performance increases in GPU-accelerated correlation of images from the International Space Station
Department of Physics and SEAS, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Journal of Real-Time Image Processing, Volume 5, Number 3, 179-193
@article{luorders,
title={Orders-of-magnitude performance increases in GPU-accelerated correlation of images from the International Space Station},
author={Lu, P.J. and Oki, H. and Frey, C.A. and Chamitoff, G.E. and Chiao, L. and Fincke, E.M. and Foale, C.M. and Magnus, S.H. and McArthur, W.S. and Tani, D.M. and others},
journal={Journal of Real-Time Image Processing},
pages={1–15},
issn={1861-8200},
publisher={Springer}
}
We implement image correlation, a fundamental component of many real-time imaging and tracking systems, on a graphics processing unit (GPU) using NVIDIA’s CUDA platform. We use our code to analyze images of liquid-gas phase separation in a model colloid-polymer system, photographed in the absence of gravity aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Our GPU code is 4,000 times faster than simple MATLAB code performing the same calculation on a central processing unit (CPU), 130 times faster than simple C code, and 30 times faster than optimized C++ code using single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) extensions. The speed increases from these parallel algorithms enable us to analyze images downlinked from the ISS in a rapid fashion and send feedback to astronauts on orbit while the experiments are still being run.
December 13, 2010 by hgpu
