DATA PARALLEL COMPUTATION OF EUCLIDEAN DISTANCE TRANSFORMS
The Euclidean Distance Transform is an important, but computationally expensive, technique of computational geometry, with applications in many areas including image processing, graphics and pattern recognition. Since the data sets used are typically large, one might hope that parallel computers would be suitable for its determination. We show that existing parallel algorithms perform poorly on certain data sets and introduce new strategies. These achieve high speed on diverse data sets, but fail occasionally in pathological cases. We determine the maximum error in such cases and demonstrate that it is satisfactorily low. Although adequate efficiency is achievable on SIMD machines, we demonstrate that problems of this kind are data parallel yet best suited to MIMD architectures.