Surface reconstruction in parallel

Abstract

By exploiting the structure of a directed toroidal graph, the authors have developed a parallel solution to find the shortest path. A parallel dynamic programming solution to finding the minimum cost path is presented. First the authors map the toroidal graph to a planar graph, whose structure is exploited to form a parallel algorithm suitable for a message-passing parallel architecture. The problem has applications in surface reconstruction, where contours of a surface are represented as graphs. Finding the shortest-path in these graphs corresponds to finding a best-fit surface over the contours. By parallelizing the solution, the authors have obtained a significant speedup to a computationally intensive problem. Since generic message passing is used for interprocessor communication, the proposed algorithm can be implemented in any distributed or parallel environment. In a heterogeneous environment, relative processor speed and memory would have to be considered for load balancing.<>