Accelerating satellite image based large-scale settlement detection with GPU

Computer vision algorithms for image analysis are often computationally demanding. Application of such algorithms on large image databases--- such as the high-resolution satellite imagery covering the entire land surface, can easily saturate the computational capabilities of conventional CPUs. There is a great demand for vision algorithms running on high performance computing (HPC) architecture capable of processing petascale image data. We exploit the parallel processing capability of GPUs to present a GPU-friendly algorithm for robust and efficient detection of settlements from large-scale high-resolution satellite imagery. Feature descriptor generation is an expensive, but a key step in automated scene analysis. To address this challenge, we present GPU implementations for three different feature descriptors-multiscale Historgram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) Contrast and local pixel intensity statistics. We perform extensive experimental evaluations of our implementation using diverse and large image datasets. Our GPU implementation of the feature descriptor algorithms results in speedups of 220 times compared to the CPU version. We present an highly efficient settlement detection system running on a multiGPU architecture capable of extracting human settlement regions from a city-scale sub-meter spatial resolution aerial imagery spanning roughly 1200 sq. kilometers in just 56 seconds with detection accuracy close to 90%. This remarkable speedup gained by our vision algorithm maintaining high detection accuracy clearly demonstrates that such computational advancements clearly hold the solution for petascale image analysis challenges.