GPU Accelerated Plant Growth Modeling and Visualization

We present a GPU-accelerated algorithm for plant growth modeling and visualization. In this algorithm, plant topological structures and geometrical structures are represented separately. Plant topological structures are generated by dual-scale automaton, and geometrical structures are dynamically constructed in parallel by the geometry shader of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This scheme greatly reduces the amount of transferred data between main memory and GPU memory, and speeds up plant growth modeling and rendering without compromising image quality. An application for cotton growth modeling and visualization is given in detail to confirm the advantages of the proposed algorithm.