Orders-of-magnitude performance increases in GPU-accelerated correlation of images from the International Space Station Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • 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. 2009 Springer-Verlag.

published proceedings

  • JOURNAL OF REAL-TIME IMAGE PROCESSING

author list (cited authors)

  • Lu, P. J., Oki, H., Frey, C. A., Chamitoff, G. E., Chiao, L., Fincke, E. M., ... Weitz, D. A.

citation count

  • 23

complete list of authors

  • Lu, Peter J||Oki, Hidekazu||Frey, Catherine A||Chamitoff, Gregory E||Chiao, Leroy||Fincke, Edward M||Foale, C Michael||Magnus, Sandra H||McArthur, William S Jr||Tani, Daniel M||Whitson, Peggy A||Williams, Jeffrey N||Meyer, William V||Sicker, Ronald J||Au, Brion J||Christiansen, Mark||Schofield, Andrew B||Weitz, David A

publication date

  • September 2010