Color and Edge Directivity Descriptor on GPGPU

Abstract

Image indexing refers to describing the visual multimedia content of a medium, using high level textual information or/and low level descriptors. In most cases, images and videos are associated with noisy and incomplete user-supplied textual annotations, possibly due to omission or the excessive cost associated with the metadata creation. In such cases, Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) approaches are adopted and low level image features are employed for indexing and retrieval. We employ the Colour and Edge Directivity Descriptor (CEDD), which incorporates both colour and texture information in a compact representation and reassess it for parallel execution, utilizing the multicore power provided by General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPUs). Experiments conducted on four different combinations of GPU-CPU technologies revealed an impressive gained acceleration when using a GPU, which was up to 22 times faster compared to the respective CPU implementation, while real-time indexing was achieved for all tested GPU models.