Performance Analysis of LiDAR Data Processing on Multi-Core CPU and GPU Architectures

The projection process of the LiDAR 3D Point Cloud data is one of the crucial steps in Computer vision applications. It involves several steps to achieve the finalized accurate results. Many current studies leverage the benefits of using a GPU in the computing capability. This paper presents a comparative study of the implementation and testing of this process on single-core, multi-core CPU and GPU architectures. The computational efficiency of each platform is evaluated through a series of benchmarks, including data extraction, segmentation, and trans-formation tasks. Our analysis reveals the inherent parallelization benefits of GPUs in handling large-scale point cloud data, while also considering the accessibility of multi-core CPUs. Also, a comparison between the NVIDIA RTX 3070 and NVIDIA RTX 4060 is provided. The RTX 3070 showed roughly a speed up of 8 times over the RTX 4060. In addition, the Multi-core implementation outperforms up to 10 times over the single-core. These results overall show the benefits of using the Multi-core and the GPU accelerating approaches to this application, with the availability for further improvements.