TY - GEN
T1 - Towards automatic digital surface model generation using a Graphics Processing Unit
AU - Van Der Merwe, Dirk
AU - Meyer, Johan
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - Digital Surface Models (DSM) are widely used in the earth sciences. It provides information for various geological studies and other applications. There are a number of methods for automatic DSM generation, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses, none of which are perfect. Even though there are plenty of algorithms to date which can generate the DSMs, it is a computationally complex calculation and does tend to take some time to complete. In order to achieve faster DSMs, an algorithm was implemented on a Graphics Processing Unit. This platform greatly improves the processing speed but does have some drawbacks; namely, no support for double precision floating point values, limited memory and algorithms has to be adapted to be usable in a stream processor environment. A speed performance increase of 900% was obtained while having a negligble decrease in accuracy. The GPU does offer a more efficient platform for computationally extensive digital surface modelling applications.
AB - Digital Surface Models (DSM) are widely used in the earth sciences. It provides information for various geological studies and other applications. There are a number of methods for automatic DSM generation, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses, none of which are perfect. Even though there are plenty of algorithms to date which can generate the DSMs, it is a computationally complex calculation and does tend to take some time to complete. In order to achieve faster DSMs, an algorithm was implemented on a Graphics Processing Unit. This platform greatly improves the processing speed but does have some drawbacks; namely, no support for double precision floating point values, limited memory and algorithms has to be adapted to be usable in a stream processor environment. A speed performance increase of 900% was obtained while having a negligble decrease in accuracy. The GPU does offer a more efficient platform for computationally extensive digital surface modelling applications.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=74349121765&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/AFRCON.2009.5308102
DO - 10.1109/AFRCON.2009.5308102
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:74349121765
SN - 9781424439195
T3 - IEEE AFRICON Conference
BT - IEEE Africon 2009
T2 - IEEE Africon 2009
Y2 - 23 September 2009 through 25 September 2009
ER -