NVIDIA has made a move to advance its work with scientifically advanced applications development by announcing CUDA support for OpenCV, the open source 'Computer Vision' library popularly used in the robotics, automotive, medical, consumer, security, manufacturing and research fields.
The visual computing specialist is bringing GPU acceleration to OpenCV developers in order to try and provide more accurate and more sophisticated algorithms in real-time on higher-resolution images with consuming less power.
NVIDIA says that this will facilitate the development of scores of new, mainstream Computer Vision applications. With what is reported to be thousands of developers and over 2-million downloads to date, OpenCV is experiencing popularity in the development of computational-intensive applications, many of which require real-time performance.
"Computational power in Computer Vision has been a limiting factor not only for the use of recent powerful algorithms in object recognition, tracking and 3D reconstruction, but also has limited the creativity of algorithms people are willing to invent," said Gary Bradski, senior researcher at Willow Garage, and founder of OpenCV. "With CUDA GPU acceleration, many OpenCV algorithms will run five to ten times faster, making current algorithms more practical for application developers and allowing the invention and combination of more capable applications in the future."
An initial release of OpenCV with CUDA GPU support for many common and powerful functions is expected to be available in the spring of 2011. Some initial GPU-enabled OpenCV functionality is currently available via the OpenCV source code repository.
