The landscape of APIs for accelerating vision and neural network software using specialized processors continues to rapidly evolve. Many industry-standard APIs, such as OpenCL and OpenVX, are being upgraded to increasingly focus on deep learning, and the industry is rapidly adopting the new generation of low-level, explicit GPU APIs, such as Vulkan, that tightly integrate graphics and compute. Neil Trevett presented the "Vision Acceleration API Landscape: Options and Trade-offs" tutorial at the May 2017 Embedded Vision Summit.
The Khronos Group held their annual BOF-Blitz at SIGGRAPH today. There were five BOFs in all, and they were all a huge success. If you were not able to get to SIGGRAPH and you missed the live stream, you can now watch the video online here.
Synopsys announced that it has enhanced the convolutional neural network (CNN) engine in its DesignWare EV6x Vision Processors to address the increasing video resolution and frame rate requirements of high-performance embedded vision applications. To simplify software application development, the EV6x processors are supported by a comprehensive suite of tools and software. Combined with software development tools based on OpenVX, OpenCV and OpenCL C embedded vision standards, the MetaWare EV Development Toolkit offers a full suite of tools needed to accelerate embedded software development.
Frank Brill, Design Engineering Director at Cadence and Chairperson of the Khronos Group's OpenVX Working Group, presents the "OpenVX Computer Vision Library Standard for Portable, Efficient Code" tutorial at the May 2017 Embedded Vision Summit.
Imagination Technologies announces the first GPU IP core based on its new PowerVR Furian architecture, the Series8XT GT8525. Says Tatiana Solokhina, CTO, RnD Center ELVEES, a Khronos member: “As a provider of SoCs for a wide range of global video analytics applications, we require a GPU that offers the best compute performance in a power constrained footprint. The new PowerVR Furian 8XT family from Imagination provides us an industry-leading GPU with new ALU for increased performance density and efficiency. In addition, support for standard compute APIs such as OpenVX enables easy implementation of real world vision processing applications.” Furian is designed to address the increasing compute requirements across multiple applications and market segments with efficient use of compute APIs including OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.0 and OpenVX 1.1.
VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd. announces VIP8000, a highly scalable and programmable processor for computer vision and artificial intelligence. It delivers over 3 Tera MACs per second, with power consumption more efficient than 1.5 GMAC/second/mW and the smallest silicon area in industry with 16FF process technology. The VIP8000 can directly import neural networks generated by popular deep learning frameworks, such as Caffe and TensorFlow and neural networks can be integrated to other computer vision functions using the OpenVX framework. The processor is programmed by OpenCL or OpenVX with a unified programming model across the hardware units, including customer application-specific hardware acceleration units. Learn more about the VIP8000.
This week at the Embedded Vision Summit (EVS) in California Imagination is showcasing their latest Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) object recognition demo. All of these networks have been implemented using Imagination’s own DNN library. IMG DNN sits on top of OpenCL but doesn’t obscure it, and makes use of OpenCL constructs so it can be used alongside other custom OpenCL code. Imagination’s Paul Brasnett is talking at EVS on the subject of ‘Training CNNs for Efficient Inference‘ and for further reading, take a look at this CNN based number recognition demo, which uses OpenVX with CNN extension. Learn more about Imagination's Convolutional Neural Networks.
The Intel Computer Vision SDK Beta is for developing and deploying vision-oriented solutions on platforms from Intel, including autonomous vehicles, digital surveillance cameras, robotics, and mixed-reality headsets. Based on OpenVX, this SDK offers many useful extensions and supports heterogeneous execution across CPU and SoC accelerators using an advanced graph compiler, optimized and developer-created kernels, and design and analysis tools. It also includes deep-learning tools that unleash inference performance on deep-learning deployment. If the functionality you need is not already available in the supplied library, you can create custom kernels using C, C++, or OpenCL kernels.
The Khronos Group announces the immediate release of the OpenVX 1.2 specification for cross-platform acceleration of computer vision applications and libraries. OpenVX is a high-level, graph-based API targeted at real-time mobile and embedded platforms. This open, cross-platform, royalty-free standard enables performance-portable, power-optimized computer vision applications such as face, body, and gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, autonomous driver assistance systems, visual inspection, and robotics. Core OpenVX 1.2 has significantly expanded functionality, including conditional execution, feature detection, and classification operations.
In December last year, Imagination announced we were the first to submit an OpenVX 1.1 conformant implementation. In this blog post, we will show how our work has developed since then on one of the first implementations of the Khronos OpenVX 1.1 API as well as the new and very first implementation of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) extension that goes along with it.
The GPU Technology Conference (GTC2017) will be running from May 8-11 this year in San Jose Convention Center. This year will see many sessions related to Khronos Technology including OpenCL, OpenGL, OpenVX, Vulkan and WebGL. NVIDIA has just added more sessions to their schedule. Check a list of Khronos related sessions on the Khronos site, or visit the NVIDIA GTC site to see all sessions.
Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced that the Cadence Tensilica Vision P-Series DSPs are the first imaging/vision DSPs to pass Khronos Group's conformance tests for the OpenVX 1.1 specification. Application developers can now take advantage of Tensilica Vision P5/P6 functionality without detailed knowledge of the hardware architecture and still achieve high performance. This enables faster development of computer vision and imaging applications on Tensilica Vision P-Series DSPs being deployed in applications processors for mobile, automotive, drone, security, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) and other markets. Read the full press release.
Don’t miss this year’s OpenVX Workshop at Embedded Vision Summit. Khronos will present a day-long hands-on workshop all about OpenVX cross-platform neural network acceleration API for embedded vision applications. We’ve developed a new curriculum so even if you attended in past years, this is a do-not-miss, jam-packed tutorial with new information on computer vision algorithms for feature tracking and neural networks mapped to the graph API. We’ll be doing a hands-on practice session that gives participants a chance to solve real computer vision problems using OpenVX with the folks who created the API. We’ll also be talking about the OpenVX roadmap and what’s to come.
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The GPU Technology Conference (GTC2017) will be running from May 8-11 this year in San Jose Convention Center. This year will see many sessions related to Khronos Technology including OpenCL, OpenGL, OpenVX, Vulkan and WebGL. NVIDIA has just added more sessions to their schedule. Check a list of Khronos related sessions on the 
Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced that the Cadence Tensilica Vision P-Series DSPs are the first imaging/vision DSPs to pass Khronos Group's conformance tests for the OpenVX 1.1 specification. Application developers can now take advantage of Tensilica Vision P5/P6 functionality without detailed knowledge of the hardware architecture and still achieve high performance. This enables faster development of computer vision and imaging applications on Tensilica Vision P-Series DSPs being deployed in applications processors for mobile, automotive, drone, security, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) and other markets. Read the full