High Performance Realtime Vision for Mobile Robots on the GPU

Abstract

University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten, [email protected], [email protected]. We present a real time vision system designed for and implementedon a graphics processing unit (GPU). After an introduction in GPU programmingwe describe the architecture of the system and software running on the GPU.We show the advantages of implementing a vision processor on the GPU ratherthan on a CPU as well as the shortcomings of this approach. Our performancemeasurements show that the GPU-based vision system including colour segmen-tation, pattern recognition and edge detection easily meets the requirements forhigh resolution (1024×768) colour image processing at a rate of up to 50 framesper second. A CPU-based implementation on a mobile PC would under theseconstraints achieve only around twelve frames per second. The source code ofthis system is available online [1].Keywords: GPU, realtime colour vision, mobile robot, Robocup, SIMD paral-lelism.