Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL; Cambridge, MA, USA) aim to make writing image-processing algorithms easier with a new programming language called Halide.
The researchers claim that Halide programs are easier to read, write and revise than image-processing programs written in a conventional language. And because Halide automates code-optimization procedures that would ordinarily take hours to perform by hand, they are also significantly faster.
In tests, the MIT researchers used Halide to rewrite several common image-processing algorithms whose performance had already been optimized by seasoned programmers. The Halide versions were typically about one-third as long but offered significant performance gains -- two-, three-, or even six-fold speedups. In one instance, the Halide program was actually longer than the original -- but the speedup was 70-fold.
Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Andrew Adams, a CSAIL postdoc, led the development of Halide, and they will shortly release the code online here. In the meantime, readers can discover more about the Halide programming language in a technical article here.
Interested in software? Here are some recent articles on the subject from Vision Systems Design that you might also find of interest.
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-- Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design
