Efficient template matching with variable size templates in CUDA

Abstract

Graphics processing units (GPUs) offer significantly higher peak performance than CPUs, but for a limited problem space. Even within this space, GPU solutions are often restricted to a set of specific problem instances or offer greatly varying performance for slightly different parameters. This makes providing a library of GPU implementations that is adaptable to arbitrary inputs a difficult task. This research is motivated by a MATLAB lung tumor tracking application that relies on two-dimensional correlation and uses large template sizes. While GPU-based template matching has been addressed in the past, template sizes were limited to specific, relatively small sizes and not acceptable for accelerating the target application. This paper discusses a CUDA implementation that supports large template sizes and is adaptable to arbitrary template dimensions. The implementation uses on-demand compilation of kernels and compile-time expansion of various kernel parameters to improve the implementation adaptability without sacrificing performance.