Searching High-Dimensional Neighbours: CPU-Based Tailored Data-Structures Versus GPU-Based Brute-Force Method

Many image processing algorithms rely on nearest neighbor (NN) or on the k nearest neighbor (kNN) search problem. Several methods have been proposed to reduce the computation time, for instance using space partitionning. However, these methods are very slow in high dimensional space. In this paper, we propose a fast implementation of the brute-force algorithm using GPU (Graphics Processing Units) programming. We show that our implementation is up to 150 times faster than the classical approaches on synthetic data, and up to 75 times faster on real image processing algorithms (finding similar patches in images and texture synthesis).