GPU Accelerated Viewshed Calculations
A lot of telcos / rural network providers need to place radio masts to serve their customers. The ideal placement of these masks can be hard, needing to balance a number of hard, technical requirements (power, line of sight, etc) with soft, social requirements (land rights, planning permission, etc).
Tools currently exist for calculating mast lines of sights (viewsheds), but they tend to be proprietary, slow, or not automatable. My honours project as part of the completion of my MEng Software Engineering programme at Napier University intends to:
- Investigate the validity and effectiveness of GPU acceleration of viewshed calculations
- Develop a core library that allows developers to embed such acceleration into tools
- Develop example tools using this library.