GPU programming for image processing

Question 1

I'm working on a project aimed to control a bipad humanoid robot. Unfortunately we have a very limited set of hardware resources (a RB110 board and its mini PCI graphic card). I'm planning to port image processing tasks from CPU to graphic card processor of possible but never done it before... I'm advised to use OpenCV but seems to impossible because our graphic card processor (Volari Z9s) is not supported by framework. Then I found an interesting post on Linux Journal. Author have used OpenGL to process frames retrieved from a v4l device.

I'm a little confused about the relationship between hardware API and OpenGL/OpenCV. In order to utilize a GPU, do the hardware need to be sopported by graphic programming frameworks (OpenGL/OpenCV)? Where can I find such an API?

I googled a lot about my hardware, unfortunately the vendor (XGI Technology) seems to be somehow extinct...

Question 2

In order to utilize a GPU, do the hardware need to be sopported by graphic programming frameworks (OpenGL/OpenCV)? Where can I find such an API?

OpenCL and OpenGL are both translated to hardware instructions by the GPU driver, so you need a driver for your operating system that supports these frameworks. Most GPU drivers support some version of OpenGL so that should work.

The OpenGL standard is maintained by the Khronos Group and you can find some tutorials at nehe.

How OpenGL works

OpenGL accepts triangles as input and draws them according to the state it has when the draw is issued. Most OpenGL functions are there to change the operations performed by manipulating this state. Image manipulation can be done by loading the input image as a texture and drawing several vertices with the texture active, resulting in a new Image (or more generic a new 2D grid of data).

From version> 2 (or with the right ARB extensions) the operations performed on the image can be controlled with GLSL programs called vertex and fragment shaders (there are more shaders, but these are the oldest). A vertex shader will be called once per vertex, the results of this are interpolated and forwarded to the fragment shader. A fragment shader will be called every time a new fragment(pixel) is written to the result.

Now this is all about reading and writing images, how to use it for object detection? Use Vertices to span the input texture over the whole viewport. Instead of computing rgb colors and storing them in the result you can write a fragmentshader that computes grayscale images / gradient images and then checks these textures for each pixel if the pixel is in the center of a cycle with a specific size, part of a line or just has a relatively high gradient compared to its surrounding (good feature) or really anithing else you can find a good parallel algorithm for. (haven't done this myself)

The end result has to be read back to the cpu (sometimes you can use shaders to scale the data down before doing this). OpenCL gives it a less Graphics like feel and gives a lot more freedom but is less supported.

Question 3

Thanks for your answer. I think graphic card has a generic driver installed by mainline kernel (since the OS can use it!) It supports VGA and SVGA modes. I wrote my first OpenGL program today (the teapot viewer). But can't understand how it works under the hood. How can I write my object detection algorithm in OpenGL? It looks like a huge set of functions to me...

Question 4

@sorush-r extended my answer and you really should check if your driver supports OpenGL or if you can find one that supports it. Without driver/hardware support you wont gain any performance.

Question 5

First of all You need shader support (GLSL or asm)

Usual way will be rendering full screen quad with your image (texture) and applying fragment shader. It's called Post-Processing And limited with instruction set and another limitations that your hardware has. On basic lvl it allows you to apply simple (single function) on large data set in parallel way that will produce another data set. But branching (if it is supported) is first performance enemy because GPU consist from couple SIMD blocks

josefx 15.7k6 gold badges42 silver badges63 bronze badges · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-25 19:01:15Z

In order to utilize a GPU, do the hardware need to be sopported by graphic programming frameworks (OpenGL/OpenCV)? Where can I find such an API?

OpenCL and OpenGL are both translated to hardware instructions by the GPU driver, so you need a driver for your operating system that supports these frameworks. Most GPU drivers support some version of OpenGL so that should work.

The OpenGL standard is maintained by the Khronos Group and you can find some tutorials at nehe.

How OpenGL works

OpenGL accepts triangles as input and draws them according to the state it has when the draw is issued. Most OpenGL functions are there to change the operations performed by manipulating this state. Image manipulation can be done by loading the input image as a texture and drawing several vertices with the texture active, resulting in a new Image (or more generic a new 2D grid of data).

From version> 2 (or with the right ARB extensions) the operations performed on the image can be controlled with GLSL programs called vertex and fragment shaders (there are more shaders, but these are the oldest). A vertex shader will be called once per vertex, the results of this are interpolated and forwarded to the fragment shader. A fragment shader will be called every time a new fragment(pixel) is written to the result.

Now this is all about reading and writing images, how to use it for object detection? Use Vertices to span the input texture over the whole viewport. Instead of computing rgb colors and storing them in the result you can write a fragmentshader that computes grayscale images / gradient images and then checks these textures for each pixel if the pixel is in the center of a cycle with a specific size, part of a line or just has a relatively high gradient compared to its surrounding (good feature) or really anithing else you can find a good parallel algorithm for. (haven't done this myself)

The end result has to be read back to the cpu (sometimes you can use shaders to scale the data down before doing this). OpenCL gives it a less Graphics like feel and gives a lot more freedom but is less supported.

Thanks for your answer. I think graphic card has a generic driver installed by mainline kernel (since the OS can use it!) It supports VGA and SVGA modes. I wrote my first OpenGL program today (the teapot viewer). But can't understand how it works under the hood. How can I write my object detection algorithm in OpenGL? It looks like a huge set of functions to me...
@sorush-r extended my answer and you really should check if your driver supports OpenGL or if you can find one that supports it. Without driver/hardware support you wont gain any performance.

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