Level set segmentation in graphics hardware

Implicit active contours are a very flexible technique in the segmentation of digital images. A novel type of hardware implementation is presented here to approach real time applications We propose to exploit the high performance of modern graphics cards for numerical computations. Vectors are regarded as images and linear algebraic operations on vectors are realized by the graphics operations of image blending. Thus, the performance benefits from the high memory bandwidth and the economy of command transfers, while the restricted precision does not infect the qualitative behavior of the level set propagation Here, we pick up a first order solver for the basic implicit level set model and present an implementation performing at 2 ms for an explicit timestep on a 128/sup 2/ image.