An Improved Hybrid Approach to Parallel Connected Component Labeling using CUDA

In many image processing tasks, connected component labeling (CCL) is performed to extract regions of interest. CCL was usually done in a sequential fashion when image resolution was relatively low and there are small number of input channels. As image resolution gets higher up to HD or Full HD and as the number of input channels increases, sequential CCL is too time-consuming to be used in real time applications. To cope with this situation, parallel CCL framework was introduced where multiple cores are utilized simultaneously. Several parallel CCL methods have been proposed in the literature. Among them are NSZ label equivalence (NSZ-LE) method[1], modified 8 directional label selection (M8DLS) method[2], and HYBRID1 method[3]. Soh [3] showed that HYBRID1 outperforms NSZ-LE and M8DLS, and argued that HYBRID1 is by far the best. In this paper we propose an improved hybrid parallel CCL algorithm termed as HYBRID2 that hybridizes M8DLS with label backtracking (LB) and show that it runs around 20% faster than HYBRID1 for various kinds of images.