text: Accuracy, descriptor size, and the time required for extraction and matching are all important factors when selecting local image descriptors. To optimize over all these requirements, this paper presents a CUDA port for the recent Learned Arrangement of Three Patches (LATCH) binary descriptors to the GPU platform. The design of LATCH makes it well suited for GPU processing. Owing to its small size and binary nature, the GPU can further be used to efficiently match LATCH features. Taken together, this leads to breakneck descriptor extraction and matching speeds. We evaluate the trade off between these speeds and the quality of results in a feature matching intensive application. To this end, we use our proposed CUDA LATCH (CLATCH) to recover structure from motion (SfM), comparing 3D reconstructions and speed using different representations. Our results show that CLATCH provides high quality 3D reconstructions at fractions of the time required by other representations, with little, if any, loss of reconstruction quality.
  @cite_14: With the addition of free programmable components to modern graphics hardware, graphics processing units (GPUs) become increasingly interesting for general purpose computations, especially due to utilizing parallel buffer processing. In this paper we present methods and techniques that take advantage of modern graphics hardware for real-time tracking and recognition of feature-points. The focus lies on the generation of feature vectors from input images in the various stages. For the generation of feature-vectors the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) method [Low04a] is used due to its high stability against rotation, scale and lighting condition changes of the processed images. We present results of the various stages for feature vector generation of our GPU implementation and compare it to the CPU version of the SIFT algorithm. The approach works well on Geforce6 series graphics board and above and takes advantage of new hardware features, e.g. dynamic branching and multiple render targets (MRT) in the fragment processor [KF05]. With the presented methods feature-tracking with real time frame rates can be achieved on the GPU and meanwhile the CPU can be used for other tasks.
  @cite_32: This paper describes novel implementations of the KLT feature track- ing and SIFT feature extraction algorithms that run on the graphics processing unit (GPU) and is suitable for video analysis in real-time vision systems. While significant acceleration over standard CPU implementations is obtained by ex- ploiting parallelism provided by modern programmable graphics hardware, the CPU is freed up to run other computations in parallel. Our GPU-based KLT im- plementation tracks about a thousand features in real-time at 30 Hz on 1024 £ 768 resolution video which is a 20 times improvement over the CPU. It works on both ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards. The GPU-based SIFT implementation works on NVIDIA cards and extracts about 800 features from 640 £ 480 video at 10Hz which is approximately 10 times faster than an optimized CPU implementation.
  @cite_39: Many computer vision tasks require interest point detection and description, such as real-time visual navigation. We present a GPU implementation of the recently proposed SpeededUp Robust Feature extractor [1], currently the state of the art for this task. Robust feature descriptors can give vast improvements in the quality and speed of subsequent steps, but require intensive computation up front that is well-suited to inexpensive graphics hardware. We describe the algorithm’s translation to the GPU in detail, with several novel optimizations, including a new method of computing multi-dimensional parallel prefix sums. It operates at over 30 Hz at HD resolutions with thousands of features and in excess of 70 Hz at SD resolutions.
  @cite_31: SIFT is a widely-used algorithm that extracts features from images; using it to extract information from hundreds of terabytes of aerial and satellite photographs requires paral-lelization in order to be feasible. We explore accelerating an existing serial SIFT implementation with OpenMP parallelization and GPU execution.
  @cite_20: 
summary: Computing local descriptors on the GPU. Of course, we are not the first to propose porting local feature extraction to the GPU. To our knowledge, nearly all these efforts used the GPU to aid in extracting floating point descriptors , including GPU-SIFT (see, e.g., @cite_20 @cite_14 @cite_32 @cite_31 ) and GPU-SURF @cite_39 . These methods all used GPUs in portions of the extraction process. For example, @cite_31 used the GPU only to compute convolutions, all other stages performed on the CPU. In addition, and more importantly, the gain in performance reported by these methods are modest and do not approach the speeds of contemporary binary descriptors, let alone our CLATCH.