[gdal-dev] Total Viewshed and GDAL

[Andrew C Aitchison]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2023, Luis Felipe Romero wrote:

> 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.

I understand that the performance is not as great as CUDA,
but OpenCL support *is* available in GDAL.

-- 
Andrew C. Aitchison                      Kendal, UK
                    andrew at aitchison.me.uk