Implementation and performance of a general purpose graphics processing unit in hyperspectral image analysis

A graphics processing unit (GPU) can perform massively parallel computations at relatively low cost. Software interfaces like NVIDIA CUDA allow for General Purpose computing on a GPU (GPGPU). Wrappers of the CUDA libraries for higher-level programming languages such as MATLAB and IDL allow its use in image processing. In this paper, we implement GPGPU in IDL with two distance measures frequently used in image classification, Euclidean distance and spectral angle, and apply these to hyperspectral imagery. First we vary the data volume of a synthetic dataset by changing the number of image pixels, spectral bands and classification endmembers to determine speed-up and to find the smallest data volume that would still benefit from using graphics hardware. Then we process real datasets that are too large to fit in the GPU memory, and study the effect of resulting extra data transfers on computing performance. We show that our GPU algorithms outperform the same algorithms for a central processor unit (CPU), that a significant speed-up can already be obtained on relatively small datasets, and that data transfers in large datasets do not significantly influence performance. Given that no specific knowledge on parallel computing is required for this implementation, remote sensing scientists should now be able to implement and use GPGPU for their data analysis.