Image Processing for Multiple-Target Tracking on a Graphics Processing Unit

Multiple-target tracking MTT systems have been implemented on many dierent platforms, however these solutions are often expensive and have long development times. Such MTT implementations require custom hardware yet oer very little flexibility with ever changing data sets and target tracking requirements. This research explores how to supplement and enhance MTT performance with an existing graphics processing unit GPU on a general computing platform. Typical computers are already equipped with powerful GPUs to support various games and multimedia applications. However, such GPUs are not currently being used in desktop MTT applications. Bottleneck MTT image processing functions frame dierencing were converted to execute on the GPU. On average, the GPU code executed 287 faster than the MATLAB implementation. Some individual functions actually executed 20 times faster than the baseline. These results indicate that the GPU is a viable source to signicantly increase the performance of MTT with a low-cost hardware solution.