Modifying an image with OpenGL ?

Question

I have a device to acquire XRay images. Due to some technical constrains, the detector is made of heterogeneous pixel size and multiple tilted and partially overlapping tiles. The image is thus distorted. The detector geometry is known precisely.

I need a function converting these distorted images into a flat image with homogeneous pixel size. I have already done this by CPU, but I would like to give a try with OpenGL to use the GPU in a portable way.

I have no experience with OpenGL programming, and most of the information I could find on the web was useless for this use. How should I proceed ? How do I do this ?

Image size are 560x860 pixels and we have batches of 720 images to process. I'm on Ubuntu.

Answer 1

Rather than OpenGL, this sounds like a CUDA, or more generally GPGPU problem.

If you have C or C++ code to do it already, CUDA should be little more than figuring out the types you want to use on the GPU and how the algorithm can be tiled.

Answer 2

OpenGL is for rendering polygons. You might be able to do multiple passes and use shaders to get what you want but you are better off re-writing the algorithm in Open*C*L. The bonus then would be you have something portable that will even use multi core CPUs if no graphics accelerator card is available.

Answer 3

If you want to do this with OpengGL, you'd normally do it by supplying the current data as a texture, and writing a fragment shader that processes that data, and set it up to render to a texture. Once the output texture is fully rendered, you can retrieve it back to the CPU and write it out as a file.

I'm afraid it's hard to do much more than a very general sketch of the overall flow without knowing more about what you're doing -- but if (as you said) you've already done this with CUDA, you apparently already have a pretty fair idea of most of the details.

Answer 4

You might find this tutorial useful (it's a bit old, but note that it does contain some OpenGL 2.x GLSL after the Cg section). I don't believe there are any shortcuts to image processing in GLSL, if that's what you're looking for... you do need to understand a lot of the 3D rasterization aspect and historical baggage to use it effectively, although once you do have a framework for inputs and outputs set up you can forget about that and play around with your own algorithms in shader code relatively easily.

Having being doing this sort of thing for years (initially using Direct3D shaders, but more recently with CUDA) I have to say that I entirely agree with the posts here recommending CUDA/OpenCL. It makes life much simpler, and generally runs faster. I'd have to be pretty desperate to go back to a graphics API implementation of non-graphics algorithms now.