A GPGPU-based Pipeline for Accelerated Rendering of Point Clouds
Chemnitz University of Technology, Department of Computer Science, Visual Computing Laboratory, Strasse der Nationen 62, 09111 Chemnitz, Germany
21st International Conference in Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision (WSCG), 2013
@article{gunther2013gpgpu,
title={A GPGPU-based Pipeline for Accelerated Rendering of Point Clouds},
author={Gunther, Christian and Kanzok, Thomas and Linsen, Lars and Rosenthal, Paul},
year={2013}
}
Direct rendering of large point clouds has become common practice in architecture and archaeology in recent years. Due to the high point density no meshes are reconstructed from the scanning data, but the points can be rendered directly as primitives of a graphics API like OpenGL. However, these APIs and the hardware, which they are based on, have been optimized to process triangle meshes. Although current API versions provide lots of control over the hardware, e.g. by using shaders, some hardware components concerned with rasterization of primitives are still hidden from the programmer. In this paper we show that it might be beneficial for point primitives to abandon the standard graphics APIs and directly switch to a GPGPU API like OpenCL.
July 12, 2013 by hgpu
