Engineers at Vector Fabrics (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) have built a tool to analyze and optimize source code for multi-core processors. As a test case, they have optimized an OpenCV image processing algorithm written in C++ and made the results available as an Android App.
OpenCV is a widely known open source library for real-time computer vision. As an example, OpenCV comes with an algorithm for Inpainting -- a mechanism to remove scratches or other artifacts from a photograph.
The engineers at Vector Fabrics parallelized the algorithm using the company's own Pareon tool. The tool analyzes source code both statically and dynamically and highlights optimization and parallelization opportunities.
Because no simple optimizations were found, the engineers opted to 'tile' the algorithm -- breaking the image into several parts and enabling the different cores of a multiprocessor system to process each piece. Once the code iterated over the tiles, the Vector Fabrics' tool correctly identified the parallelization opportunity and generated the code changes needed to run the algorithm on a multi-core processor.
In a whitepaper available here, Klaas van Gend, senior field applications engineer at Vector Fabrics, describes the optimization process that resulted in a speed-up of up to 4x on quad-core ARM architectures, and 2x on dual-core architectures.
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-- Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design
