Implementation of non local means filter in GPUs

Abstract

In this paper, we review some alternatives to reduce the computational complexity of the Non-Local Means image filter and present a CUDA-based implementation of it for GPUs, comparing its performance on different GPUs and with respect to reference CPU implementations. Starting from a naive CUDA implementation, we describe different aspects of CUDA and the algorithm itself that can be leveraged to decrease the execution time. Our GPU implementation achieved speedups of up to 35.8x with respect to our reduced-complexity reference implementation on the CPU, and more than 700x over a plain CPU implementation. © Springer-Verlag 2013.