Quadrotor

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1. How to enable CUDA

The CUDA implementation in the package is not compiled by default.

To enable it for visual stuio 2005, use vc/SiftGPU_CUDA_Enabled.sln

To enable it for other OS, you need to change siftgpu_enable_cuda to 1 in the makefile

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2. Change CUDA build parameters.

For windows, you need to change the settings in the custom build command line of 

ProgramCU.cu. For example, add -use_fast_match for using fast match. 

For Other OS, you need to change the makefile. The top part of the makefile is 

the configuration section, which includes: 

	siftgpu_enable_cuda = 0             (Set 1 to enable CUDA-based SiftGPU)

	CUDA_INSTALL_PATH = /usr/local/cuda (Where to find CUDA)

	siftgpu_cuda_options = -arch sm_10  (Additional CUDA Compiling options)

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3. CUDA runtime parameters for SiftGPU::ParseParam

First, you need to specify "-cuda" to use CUDA-based SiftGPU. More parameters can 

be chagned at runtime in CUDA-based SiftGPU than in OpenGL-based version. Check out

the manual for details. 

NEW. You can choose GPU for CUDA computation by using "-cuda [device_index=0]"

One parameter for CUDA is "-di", which controls whether dynamic indexing is used

in descriptor generations. It is turned off by default. My experiments on 8800 

GTX show that unrolled loop of 8 if-assigns are faster than dynamic indexing, but

it might be different on other GPUs.

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4. Speed of CUDA-based SiftGPU

If the size of the first octave (multiply the original size by 2 if upsample is used)

is less than or around 1024x768, CUDA version will be faster than OpenGL versions, 

otherwise the OpenGL versions are still faster. 

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This is observed on nVidia 8800 GTX, it might be different on other GPUs. Recent

experiments on GTX280 show that CUDA version is not as fast as OpenGL version. 

Note: the thread block settings are currently tuned on GPU nVidia GTX 8800, 

       which may not be optimized for other GPUs.

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