GPU-Based Computation of the Integral Image

The integral image can be used to quickly complete common pixel-level operations in the regular region of the grey-level image. So it has been widely used in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition. In this paper, we firstly present an intuitive parallel method to compute the integral image. Then based on the intuitive method, a two-stage method based on the binary tree is introduced. In each stage of the algorithm, we do a firstly top-down and secondly bottom-up traversal over the tree. Finally, we analyze the case of large-scale grey-level image and optimize the computation based on the CUD Aarchitecture. We have done the experiment in the consumerlevel PC hardware which shows that the GPU-based algorithm outperforms the corresponded CPU-based algorithm in terms of speed in case of large-scale images.