Abstract
Minimum enclosing balls are used extensively to speed up multidimensional data processing in, e.g., machine learning, spatial databases, and computer graphics. We present a case study of several acceleration techniques that are applicable in enclosing ball algorithms based on repeated farthest-point queries. Two different distance filtering heuristics are proposed aiming at reducing the cost of the farthest-point queries as much as possible by exploiting lower and upper distance bounds. Furthermore, auto-tunable GPU solutions using CUDA are developed for both low- and high-dimensional cases. Empirical tests apply these techniques to two recent algorithms and demonstrate substantial speedups of the ball computations. Our results also indicate that a combination of the approaches has the potential to give further performance improvements.