Colour diffusion model acceleration on GPUs

In this paper we propose several algorithms for parallel implementation on GPUs of a diffusion model for colour images to be used as external energy for active contours. The diffusion model was proposed for colour images and is based on the first order moment of the correlation integral expressed using ΔE distances in the CIE Lab colour space, while most of the existing diffusion models are defined only for grayscale images. The acceleration we propose was used in a multi-scale active contour approach. We describe our various approaches for accelerating and parallel implementation and report on the performance increase we obtain. We show how the diffusion model was successfully used to segment dermatological images. We conclude that the proposed approaches and parallel implementations are useful for speeding up the process of automatic analysis of medical images, mandatory for every-day clinical screening.