Computing shortest path maps with GPU shaders

Abstract

We present in this paper a new GPU-based approach to compute Shortest Path Maps (SPMs) from a source point in a polygonal domain. Our method takes advantage of GPU polygon rasterization with shader programming. After encoding the SPM in the frame buffer, globally shortest paths are efficiently computed in time proportional to the number of vertices in the path, and length queries are computed in constant time. We have evaluated our method in multiple environments and our results show a significant speedup in comparison to previous approaches.