Learning OpenCV

Integrated Performance Primitives

Intel has a product called the Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) library (IPP). This library is essentially a toolbox of high-performance kernels for handling multimedia and other processor-intensive operations in a manner that makes extensive use of the detailed architecture of their processors (and, to a lesser degree, other manufacturers' processors that have a similar architecture).

As discussed in Chapter 1, OpenCV enjoys a close relationship with IPP, both at a software level and at an organizational level inside of the company. As a result, OpenCV is designed to automatically^[37] recognize the presence of the IPP library and to automatically "swap out" the lower-performance implementations of many core functionalities for their higher-performance counterparts in IPP. The IPP library allows OpenCV to take advantage of performance opportunities that arrive from SIMD instructions in a single processor as well as from modern multicore architectures.

With these basics in hand, we can perform a wide variety of basic tasks. Moving onward through the text, we will look at many more sophisticated capabilities of OpenCV, almost all of which are built on these routines. It should be no surprise that image processing—which often requires doing the same thing to a whole lot of data, much of which is completely parallel—would realize a great benefit from any code that allows it to take advantage of parallel execution units of any form (MMX, SSE, SSE2, ...