The Radon transform and its adjoint, the back-projection operator, can both
be expressed as convolutions in log-polar coordinates. Hence, fast algorithms
for the application of the operators can be constructed by using FFT, if data
is resampled at log-polar coordinates. Radon data is typically measured on an
equally spaced grid in polar coordinates, and reconstructions are represented
(as images) in Cartesian coordinates. Therefore, in addition to FFT, several
steps of interpolation have to be conducted in order to apply the Radon
transform and the back-projection operator by means of convolutions.
Both the interpolation and the FFT operations can be efficiently implemented
on Graphical Processor Units (GPUs). For the interpolation, it is possible to
make use of the fact that linear interpolation is hard-wired on GPUs, meaning
that it has the same computational cost as direct memory access. Cubic order
interpolation schemes can be constructed by combining linear interpolation
steps which provides important computation speedup.
We provide details about how the Radon transform and the back-projection can
be implemented efficiently as convolution operators on GPUs. For large data
sizes, speedups of about 10 times are obtained in relation to the computational
times of other software packages based on GPU implementations of the Radon
transform and the back-projection operator. Moreover, speedups of more than a
1000 times are obtained against the CPU-implementations provided in the MATLAB
image processing toolbox