Acceleration of computation of φ-polynomials

The benefits of making an effective use of impressive computational power offered by multi-core platforms are investigated for the computation of φ-polynomials used in the description of freeform surfaces. Specifically, we devise parallel algorithms based upon the recurrence relations of both Zernike polynomials and gradient orthogonal Q-polynomials and implement these parallel algorithms on Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) respectively. The results show that more than an order of magnitude improvement is achieved in computational time over a sequential implementation if these recurrence-based parallel algorithms are adopted in the computation of the φ-polynomials.