Experiences in speeding up computer vision applications on mobile computing platforms

—Computer vision (CV) is widely expected to be the next big thing in mobile computing. The availability of a camera and a large number of sensors in mobile devices will enable CV applications that understand the environment and enhance people’s lives through augmented reality. One of the problems yet to solve is how to transfer demanding state-of-the-art CV algorithms —designed to run on powerful desktop computers with several GPUs— onto energy-efficient, but slow, processors and GPUs found in mobile devices. To accommodate to the lack of performance, current CV applications for mobile devices are simpler versions of more complex algorithms, which generally run slowly and unreliably and provide a poor user experience. In this paper, we investigate ways to speed up demanding CV applications to run faster on mobile devices. We selected KinectFusion (KF) as a representative CV application. The KF application constructs a 3D model from the images captured by a Kinect. After portin...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: SAMOS
• Authors: Luna Backes, Alejandro Rico, Björn Franke
• Keywords: Embedded Systems, SAMOS 2015