Hybrid CPU-GPU Solver for Gradient Domain Processing of Massive Images

Gradient domain processing is a computationally expensive image processing technique. Its use for processing massive images, giga or terapixels in size, can take several hours with serial techniques. To address this challenge, parallel algorithms are being developed to make this class of techniques applicable to the largest images available with running times that are more acceptable to the users. To this end we target the most ubiquitous form of computing power available today, which is small or medium scale clusters of commodity hardware. Such clusters are continuously increasing in scale, not only in the number of nodes, but also in the amount of parallelism available within each node in the form of multicore CPUs and GPUs. In this paper we present a hybrid parallel implementation of gradient domain processing for seamless stitching of gigapixel panoramas that utilizes MPI, threading and a CUDA based GPU component. We demonstrate the performance and scalability of our implementation by presenting results from two GPU clusters processing two large data sets.