Opinion: Do you want GPU processing?

[salmanulhaq]

Hello community,

I've been wondering this for a while now. I want to gauge demand for adding GPU support for some of the more compute intensive functions in node-opencv. For example, GPU processing can accelerate face detection and even resizing very large images etc. Would that be valuable?

I'll consider contributing GPU support if there's enough interest.

Thanks!

[mvines]

Yes please! Adding support for OpenCV 3's UMat matrix API would be a great start, although we still need to retain compatibility with OpenCV 2 (where UMat is not available).

• http://www.learnopencv.com/opencv-transparent-api/
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33602675/what-is-the-difference-between-umat-and-mat-in-opencv

[salmanulhaq]

I'd recommend sticking to Mat since UMat (a quick glance at the links you shared) shows it supports OpenCL but does not mention CUDA where NVIDIA GPUs are available.

[peterbraden]

This would be awesome, but is there a way to target both CUDA and OpenCL?

I don't know much about it, but definitely think it would be cool.

[salmanulhaq]

Unfortunately CUDA and OpenCL implementations of OpenCV's functions are not unified i.e. we'd have to call them separately. Ideally, I was thinking about a wrapper which determined what GPU is available and then executes accordingly, something like this:

var opencv = require('opencv')('ACCELERATED'); //check what accelerator is available (CUDA for NVIDIA GPU, OpenCL for AMD and default CPU implementation for Intel CPU) and use it for processing, wherever possible
opencv.readImage(/image/path, function(err,img){
   img.resize(...);
});

[mgcrea]

Would love to have OpenCL support!

[skolesnyk]

An absolute must! Could you create a chip-in so we would be able to financially contribute to development? It's been almost year since you've started this thread.

Btw, take a look at how cuda/non cuda functions are called in the example here. https://github.com/opencv/opencv/blob/master/samples/gpu/generalized_hough.cpp . Looks like cuda support is already in OpenCV 2.4