Systematic Optimization of Image Processing Pipelines Using GPUs

Real-time computer vision systems require fast and efficient image processing pipelines. Experiments have shown that GPUs are highly suited for image processing operations, since many tasks can be processed in parallel. However, calling GPU-accelerated functions requires uploading the input parameters to the GPU’s memory, calling the function itself, and downloading the result afterwards. In addition, since not all functions benefit from an increase in parallelism, many pipelines cannot be implemented exclusively using GPU functions. As a result, the optimization of pipelines requires a careful analysis of the achievable function speedup and the cost of copying data. In this paper, we first define a mathematical model to estimate the performance of an image processing pipeline. Thereafter, we present a number of micro-benchmarks gathered using OpenCV which we use to validate the model and which quantify the cost and benefits for different classes of functions. Our experiments show that comparing the function speedup without considering the time for copying can overestimate the achievable performance gain of GPU acceleration by a factor of two. Finally, we present a tool that analyzes the possible combinations of CPU and GPU function implementations for a given pipeline and computes the most efficient composition. By using the tool on their target hardware, developers can easily apply our model to optimize their application performance systematically.