Computer Vision with OpenCV 3 and Qt5

The UMat class

The UMat class is a newly introduced Mat-like class and is not available on OpenCV versions prior to version 3.0. The advantage of using the new UMat class (or Unified Mat class) depends mostly on the presence of an OpenCL layer on the platform it is running on. We're not going to go through the gory details of that, but it should be enough to note that OpenCL (with an L, not to be confused with our own OpenCV) is a framework that allows the use of CPUs, GPUs, and other computing resources on a system to work together (sometimes even in parallel) to achieve a common computing goal. So, simply put, if it exists on a platform, then passing the UMat class to an OpenCV function will cause the underlying OpenCL instructions to be ...