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

Citation:

Lu, P. J. ; Oki, H. ; Frey, C. A. ; Chamitoff, G. E. ; Chiao, L. ; Fincke, E. M. ; Foale, C. M. ; Magnus, S. H. ; McArthur, William S., J. ; Tani, D. M. ; et al. Orders-of-magnitude performance increases in GPU-accelerated correlation of images from the International Space Station. J Real-Time Image Proc 2009, 5 179-193. Copy at http://www.tinyurl.com/y29t7yfa
lu2009.pdf970 KB

Abstract:

We implement image correlation, a fundamental component of many real-time imaging and tracking systems, on a graphics processing unit (GPU) using NVI-DIA'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.

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/16/2021