Parallel Connected Component Labeling Based on the Selective Four Directional Label Search Using CUDA

Parallel Connected Component Labeling Based on the Selective Four Directional Label Search Using CUDA

Connected component labeling (CCL) is a mandatory step in image segmentation where objects are extracted and uniquely labeled. CCL is a computationally expensive operation and thus is often done in parallel processing framework to reduce execution time. Various parallel CCL methods have been proposed in the literature. Among them are NSZ label equivalence (NSZ-LE) method, modified 8 directional label selection (M8DLS) method, HYBRID1 method, and HYBRID2 method. Soh et al. showed that HYBRID2 outperforms the others and is the best so far. In this paper we propose a new hybrid parallel CCL algorithm termed as HYBRID3 that combines selective four directional label search (S4DLS) with label backtracking (LB). We show that the average percentage speedup of the proposed over M8DLS is around 60% more than that of HYBRID2 over M8DLS for various kinds of images.