filename : Hein08b.pdf entry : inproceedings conference : Graphics Hardware 2008, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, June 20-21, 2008 pages : 21-31 year : 2008 month : June title : A Hardware Processing Unit for Point Sets subtitle : author : Simon Heinzle, Gael Guennebaud, Mario Botsch, Markus Gross (ETH Zurich) booktitle : ISSN/ISBN : 1727-3471 editor : David Luebke, John Owens publisher : Eurographics Association publ.place : Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland volume : issue : language : English keywords : Graphics Hardware, point-based geometry processing abstract : We present a hardware architecture and processing unit for point sampled data. Our design is focused on fundamental and computationally expensive operations on point sets including k-nearest neighbors search, moving least squares approximation, and others. Our architecture includes a configurable processing module allowing users to implement custom operators and to run them directly on the chip. A key component of our design is the spatial search unit based on a kd-tree performing both kNN and eN searches. It utilizes stack recursions and features a novel advanced caching mechanism allowing direct reuse of previously computed neighborhoods for spatially coherent queries. In our FPGA prototype, both modules are multi-threaded, exploit full hardware parallelism, and utilize a fixed-function data path and control logic for maximum throughput and minimum chip surface. A detailed analysis demonstrates the performance and versatility of our design.