Hardware-efficient belief propagation
Journal
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
Journal Volume
21
Journal Issue
5
Pages
525-537
Date Issued
2011
Author(s)
Abstract
Loopy belief propagation (BP) is an effective solution for assigning labels to the nodes of a graphical model such as the Markov random field (MRF), but it requires high memory, bandwidth, and computational costs. Furthermore, the iterative, pixel-wise, and sequential operations of BP make it difficult to parallelize the computation. In this paper, we propose two techniques to address these issues. The first technique is a new message passing scheme named tile-based BP that reduces the memory and bandwidth to a fraction of the ordinary BP algorithms without performance degradation by splitting the MRF into many tiles and only storing the messages across the neighboring tiles. The tile-wise processing also enables data reuse and pipeline, resulting in efficient hardware implementation. The second technique is an O ( L ) fast message construction algorithm that exploits the properties of robust functions for parallelization. We apply these two techniques to a very large-scale integration circuit for stereo matching that generates high-resolution disparity maps in near real-time. We also implement the proposed schemes on graphics processing unit (GPU) which is four-time faster than standard BP on GPU.
Type
journal article