Real-Time Marker Level Set on GPU

Abstract

Level set methods have been extensively used to track the dynamical interfaces between different materials for physically based simulation, geometry modeling, oceanic modeling and other scientific and engineering applications. Due to the inherent Eulerian characteristics, interface evolution based on level set usually suffers from numerical diffusion, sharp feature missing and mass loss. Although some effective methods such as particle level set (PLS) and marker level set (MLS) have been proposed to tackle these difficulties, the complicated correction process and the high computational cost pose severe limitations for real-time applications. In this paper we provide an efficient parallel implementation of the marker level set method on latest graphics hardware. Each step of the MLS method is fully mapped on GPU with an innovative combination of different computation techniques. Relying on GPL's parallelism and flexible programmability, the method provides real-time performance for large size 2D examples and moderate 3D examples, which is significantly faster than previous CPU-based methods.