[gdal-dev] Total Viewshed and GDAL

[Luis Felipe Romero]

Dear gdal-dev group members,

I hope this email finds you well. I am Luis Felipe Romero, a researcher from the University of Malaga in Spain, and I am excited to introduce myself to this community. My research focuses on algorithms for digital elevation models (DEM), and in particular, the development of algorithms for the 
calculation of the total viewshed.

Recently, my team has developed a highly efficient algorithm that can calculate the total viewshed for a model of 2500x2500 points in just 4 seconds on a GPU or approximately 2 minutes on a 16-core CPU. Our algorithm is written in C++, and we also have a version that utilizes CUDA for GPU acceleration.

I had a conversation with Even Roualt about the possibility of integrating our algorithm into GDAL. However, he informed me of the incompatibilities between GDAL and CUDA, but encouraged me to share my intentions with the group. Therefore, I would like to share our Total Viewshed approach with the 
gdal-dev community.

Unlike Tamas Szekeres' Viewshed algorithm, our approach calculates the viewshed at all model points simultaneously by leveraging in-memory data alignment. While it may not be as efficient for calculating the viewshed of a small set of points, it is incredibly useful for determining the viewshed of 
an entire territory, such as for selecting the location of a cell phone tower or for forest surveillance path planning. Our algorithm can complete these types of calculations in a matter of minutes, as opposed to thousands of hours.

My primary goal in reaching out to this group is to gain feedback and insights on how GDAL can be used to make our algorithms publicly accessible and even improved upon by the community. I believe that GDAL provides the necessary tools and interfaces to make this possible.

I am currently in the process of familiarizing myself with the GDAL code structure, and it will take a few days before I can determine my first steps with it. Nevertheless, I am excited to contribute to this community and give visibility to our work.

Thank you all in advance for your time and consideration.

Best regards,
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