Increasing performance and power efficiency in heterogeneous software
Heterogeneous architectures in embedded computing are fast becoming a reality – we indeed see many leading IP and semiconductor companies today building heterogeneous computing hardware.
In the article below, I’m going to describe one typical use case for heterogeneous computing and the challenges that result from moving to a heterogeneous programming model.
Running a beautification algorithm on a modern SoC
The diagram below illustrates how a video recording application that performs beautification might be implemented using a number of heterogeneous hardware and software components. In this example, input frames captured by the ISP/camera are first inspected by the GPU to determine the position of a face and its individual features (i.e. eyes, lips, nose and possibly others), passing these coordinates along to the CPU which tracks and automatically adjusts the camera focus and exposure to maintain high quality video. The CPU also determines which parts of the face contain skin colour, and the GPU applies a bilinear filter which smooths these textures, removing artefacts that represent blemishes and wrinkles, while preserving sharpness around the edges of the face.
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