Fast and cross-vendor OpenCL-based implementation for voxelization of triangular mesh models

ABSTRACT

As the open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems, OpenCL has been used in this study in the context of a particular and intensive computing task, namely the voxelization of tessellated objects. For this purpose, OpenCL platform has been utilized to develop a parallelized voxelization algorithm that relies on a fast and efficient triangular mesh facet/cube overlapping test. The extensive numerical tests conducted with heterogeneous hardware configurations on geometric objects of varying complexities, mesh/domain sizes, and voxel resolutions suggest that up to 99.6% or 260 times decrease in the computation time can be obtained when GPU- or CPU-based parallelized techniques are used instead of the conventional single-thread CPU approach. Future developments will attempt the integration of the current implementation into a virtual orthopaedic surgery platform.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• OpenCL
• Voxelization
• GPGPU
• GPU Computing

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support provided in part by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) that was received under the framework of the Collaborative Health Research Projects (CHRP) program.

ORCID

Mohammadreza Faieghi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0075-2969

O. Remus Tutunea-Fatan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1016-5103

Roy Eagleson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9264-8135