Ray Casting Deformable Models on the GPU

The GPUs pack high computation power and a restricted architecture into easily available hardware today. They are now used as computation co-processors and come with programming models that treat them as standard parallel architectures. Ray casting is an inherently parallel and highly compute intensive operation. We explore the problem of real time ray casting of large deformable models (over a million triangles) on large displays (a million pixels) on an off-theshelf GPU in this paper. We build a GPU-efficient threedimensional data structure for this purpose and a corresponding algorithm that uses it for fast ray casting. We also present fast methods to build the data structure on the SIMD GPUs, including a fast multi-split operation. We achieve real-time ray-casting of a million triangle model onto a million pixels on current Nvidia GPUs using the CUDA model. Results are presented on the data structure building and ray casting on a number of models. The ideas presented here are like...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICVGIP
• Authors: Suryakant Patidar, P. J. Narayanan
• Keywords: Computer Vision, Data Structure, Fast Ray Casting, ICVGIP 2008, Ray Casting