An efficient GPU approach for designing 3D cultural heritage information systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GPU-accelerated architecture for 3D cultural heritage information systems that uses 2D textures for efficient storage and indexing, improving performance over octree-based methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel GPU-based architecture utilizing 2D textures for layered 3D information management, addressing performance and storage issues of previous octree-based systems.

Findings

Significant performance improvements over octree-based systems

Efficient storage and indexing using 2D textures on GPU

Layered information structure independent of mesh resolution

Abstract

We propose a new architecture for 3D information systems that takes advantage of the inherent parallelism of the GPUs. This new solution structures information as thematic layers, allowing a level of detail independent of the resolution of the meshes. Previous proposals of layer based systems present issues, both in terms of performance and storage, due to the use of octrees to index information. In contrast, our approach employs two-dimensional textures, highly efficient in GPU, to store and index information. In this article we describe this architecture and detail the GPU algorithms required to edit these layers. Finally, we present a performance comparison of our approach against an octree based system.