Accelerated Computation of Minimum Enclosing Balls by GPU Parallelization and Distance Filtering

Minimum enclosing balls are used extensively to speed up multidimensional data processing in, e.g., machine learning, spatial databases, and computer graphics. We present a case study of several acceleration techniques that are applicable in enclosing ball algorithms based on repeated farthest-point queries. Parallel GPU solutions using CUDA are developed for both low- and high-dimensional cases. Furthermore, two different distance filtering heuristics are proposed aiming at reducing the cost of the farthest-point queries as much as possible by exploiting lower and upper distance bounds. Empirical tests show encouraging results. Compared to a sequential CPU version of the algorithm, the GPU parallelization runs up to 11 times faster. When applying the distance filtering techniques, further speedups are observed.