First Evaluation of the CPU, GPGPU and MIC Architectures for Real Time Particle Tracking based on Hough Transform at the LHC

Recent innovations focused around {\em parallel} processing, either through systems containing multiple processors or processors containing multiple cores, hold great promise for enhancing the performance of the trigger at the LHC and extending its physics program. The flexibility of the CMS/ATLAS trigger system allows for easy integration of computational accelerators, such as NVIDIA's Tesla Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) or Intel's \xphi, in the High Level Trigger. These accelerators have the potential to provide faster or more energy efficient event selection, thus opening up possibilities for new complex triggers that were not previously feasible. At the same time, it is crucial to explore the performance limits achievable on the latest generation multicore CPUs with the use of the best software optimization methods. In this article, a new tracking algorithm based on the Hough transform will be evaluated for the first time on a multi-core Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 CPU, an NVIDIA Tesla K20c GPU, and an Intel \xphi\ 7120 coprocessor. Preliminary time performance will be presented.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, Accepted to JINS

A survey of visual preprocessing and shape representation techniques

Many recent theories and methods proposed for visual preprocessing and shape representation are summarized. The survey brings together research from the fields of biology, psychology, computer science, electrical engineering, and most recently, neural networks. It was motivated by the need to preprocess images for a sparse distributed memory (SDM), but the techniques presented may also prove useful for applying other associative memories to visual pattern recognition. The material of this survey is divided into three sections: an overview of biological visual processing; methods of preprocessing (extracting parts of shape, texture, motion, and depth); and shape representation and recognition (form invariance, primitives and structural descriptions, and theories of attention)

Fully automatized parallel segmentation of the optic disc in retinal fundus images

This paper presents a fully automatic parallel software for the localization of the optic disc (OD) in retinal fundus color images. A new method has been implemented with the Graphics Processing Units (GPU) technology. Image edges are extracted using a new operator, called AGP-color segmentator. The resulting image is binarized with Hamadani’s technique and, finally, a new algorithm called Hough circle cloud is applied for the detection of the OD. The reliability of the tool has been tested with 129 images from the public databases DRIVE and DIARETDB1 obtaining an average accuracy of 99.6% and a mean consumed time per image of 7.6 and 16.3 s respectively. A comparison with several state-of-the-art algorithms shows that our algorithm represents a significant improvement in terms of accuracy and efficiency.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2012-3743

A parallel windowing approach to the Hough transform for line segment detection

In the wide range of image processing and computer vision problems, line segment detection has always been among the most critical headlines. Detection of primitives such as linear features and straight edges has diverse applications in many image understanding and perception tasks. The research presented in this dissertation is a contribution to the detection of straight-line segments by identifying the location of their endpoints within a two-dimensional digital image. The proposed method is based on a unique domain-crossing approach that takes both image and parameter domain information into consideration. First, the straight-line parameters, i.e. location and orientation, have been identified using an advanced Fourier-based Hough transform. As well as producing more accurate and robust detection of straight-lines, this method has been proven to have better efficiency in terms of computational time in comparison with the standard Hough transform. Second, for each straight-line a window-of-interest is designed in the image domain and the disturbance caused by the other neighbouring segments is removed to capture the Hough transform buttery of the target segment. In this way, for each straight-line a separate buttery is constructed. The boundary of the buttery wings are further smoothed and approximated by a curve fitting approach. Finally, segments endpoints were identified using buttery boundary points and the Hough transform peak. Experimental results on synthetic and real images have shown that the proposed method enjoys a superior performance compared with the existing similar representative works

An investigation into combining both facial detection and landmark localisation into a unified procedure using GPU computing

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a unified framework for face detection and landmark alignment in arbitrary in the wild images. Traditionally, both of these problems have been addressed separately in literature with impressive results being recently reported in both of these fields. But, if one was to construct a pipeline consisting of a state-of-the-art face detection method followed by a state-of-the-art facial landmark localisation algorithm, the overall performance outcome would not be proficient enough to be used in high level algorithms such as face recognition and facial expression. This is because the accuracy produced by the face detector is not sufficiently high enough to initialise the landmark localisation algorithm. To address this aforementioned limitation, this thesis aims to propose an approach that combines both of these tasks into a single unified algorithm that can be run in real time, by utilising the parallel computing architecture of the graphics processing unit (GPU). This will be done by using a Cascaded-Regression (CR) algorithm in a sliding window fashion. The proposed system will exploit the CR algorithms ability to compute the 2D pose of a face from rough initial estimates, in order to generate a Hough- Transform voting scheme for detecting candidate faces and filtering out irrelevant background. The obtained detection surface will then be further refined using SVM to yield both face detections and the location of their parts. The proposed system for this thesis will be built within the MATLAB environment, using a MEX-file which will provide an interface to the proposed CUDA algorithm. The results of which, will be tested against current state-of-the-art methods for both face detection and landmark localisation. We evaluate performance on the most widely used data sets in face detection, namely annotated faces in-the-wild (AFW) (Zhu and Ramanan, 2012), Face Detection Dataset and Benchmark (FDDB) (Jain and Learned-Miller, 2010) and Caltech Occluded Faces in the Wild (COFW) (Burgos-Artizzu, Perona and Dollár, 2013). The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed unified framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in both face detection and facial alignment, and that our detector clearly outperforms all commercial and published methods by a margin of over 10% in detection accuracy on the AFW dataset

Vision-Based Road Detection in Automotive Systems: A Real-Time Expectation-Driven Approach

The main aim of this work is the development of a vision-based road detection system fast enough to cope with the difficult real-time constraints imposed by moving vehicle applications. The hardware platform, a special-purpose massively parallel system, has been chosen to minimize system production and operational costs. This paper presents a novel approach to expectation-driven low-level image segmentation, which can be mapped naturally onto mesh-connected massively parallel SIMD architectures capable of handling hierarchical data structures. The input image is assumed to contain a distorted version of a given template; a multiresolution stretching process is used to reshape the original template in accordance with the acquired image content, minimizing a potential function. The distorted template is the process output.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

Hardware acceleration of the trace transform for vision applications

Computer Vision is a rapidly developing field in which machines process visual data to extract meaningful information. Digitised images in their pixels and bits serve no purpose of their own. It is only by interpreting the data, and extracting higher level information that a scene can be understood. The algorithms that enable this process are often complex, and data-intensive, limiting the processing rate when implemented in software. Hardware-accelerated implementations provide a significant performance boost that can enable real- time processing. The Trace Transform is a newly proposed algorithm that has been proven effective in image categorisation and recognition tasks. It is flexibly defined allowing the mathematical details to be tailored to the target application. However, it is highly computationally intensive, which limits its applications. Modern heterogeneous FPGAs provide an ideal platform for accelerating the Trace transform for real-time performance, while also allowing an element of flexibility, which highly suits the generality of the Trace transform. This thesis details the implementation of an extensible Trace transform architecture for vision applications, before extending this architecture to a full flexible platform suited to the exploration of Trace transform applications. As part of the work presented, a general set of architectures for large-windowed median and weighted median filters are presented as required for a number of Trace transform implementations. Finally an acceleration of Pseudo 2-Dimensional Hidden Markov Model decoding, usable in a person detection system, is presented. Such a system can be used to extract frames of interest from a video sequence, to be subsequently processed by the Trace transform. All these architectures emphasise the need for considered, platform-driven design in achieving maximum performance through hardware acceleration