Real-time 3D mapping is a critical component in many important applications today including robotics, AR/VR, and 3D visualization. 3D mapping involves continuously fusing depth maps obtained from depth sensors in phones, robots, and autonomous vehicles into a single 3D representative model of the scene. Many important applications, e.g., global path planning and trajectory generation in micro aerial vehicles, require the construction of large maps at high resolutions. In this work, we identify mapping, i.e., construction and updates of 3D maps to be a critical bottleneck in these applications. The memory required and access times of these maps limit the size of the environment and the resolution with which the environment can be feasibly mapped, especially in resource constrained environments such as autonomous robot platforms and portable devices. To address this challenge, we propose VoxelCache: a hardware-software technique to accelerate map data access times in 3D mapping applications. We observe that mapping applications typically access voxels in the map that are spatially co-located to each other. We leverage this temporal locality in voxel accesses to cache indices to blocks of voxels to enable quick lookup and avoid expensive access times. We evaluate VoxelCache on popularly used mapping and reconstruction applications on both GPUs and CPUs. We demonstrate an average speedup of 1.47X (up to 1.66X) and 1.79X (up to 1.91X) on CPUs and GPUs respectively.

SUMMARY: We present MitoVisualize, a new tool for analysis of the human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). MitoVisualize enables visualization of: (i) the position and effect of variants in mitochondrial transfer RNA and ribosomal RNA secondary structures alongside curated variant annotations, (ii) data across RNA structures, such as to show all positions with disease-associated variants or with post-transcriptional modifications and (iii) the position of a base, gene or region in the circular mtDNA map, such as to show the location of a large deletion. All visualizations can be easily downloaded as figures for reuse. MitoVisualize can be useful for anyone interested in exploring mtDNA variation, though is designed to facilitate mtDNA variant interpretation in particular. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: MitoVisualize can be accessed via https://www.mitovisualize.org/. The source code is available at https://github.com/leklab/mito_visualize/. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.