Real-time B-spline Free-Form Deformation via GPU acceleration

Accurate Free-Form Deformation is an analytical solution of deformation sampling, where a polygonal object is deformed as a set of trimmed Bézier surfaces. However, the operation is far from being interactive due to its high computational cost. In this paper, we proposed a real-time B-spline FreeForm Deformation of polygonal objects via GPU acceleration. Various time-consuming evaluations are designed and performed by means of highly parallel processing on GPGPU, such as evaluations of points of B-spline volume, calculations of control points of Bézier surfaces, tessellations of trimmed Bézier surfaces, evaluations of normals of tessellated triangles, etc. The adoption of vertex buffer object for rendering the tessellated trimmed Bézier surfaces greatly saves data I/O throughput. Experimental results show that the proposed GPU algorithm gains more than 200 times acceleration than its CPU counterpart. & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.