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

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.