An evaluation of GPU acceleration for sparse reconstruction

Abstract

Image processing applications typically parallelize well. This gives a developer interested in data throughput several different implementation options, including multiprocessor machines, general purpose computation on the graphics processor, and custom gate-array designs. Herein, we will investigate these first two options for dictionary learning and sparse reconstruction, specifically focusing on the K-SVD algorithm for dictionary learning and the Batch Orthogonal Matching Pursuit for sparse reconstruction. These methods have been shown to provide state of the art results for image denoising, classification, and object recognition. We'll explore the GPU implementation and show that GPUs are not significantly better or worse than CPUs for this application.