New Programming Language Makes Image Processing Faster

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have written a new programming language called "Halide." The language is intended for optimizing image-processing algorithms.

In tests, the MIT researchers used Halide to rewrite several common image-processing algorithms whose performance had already been optimized by seasoned programmers. The Halide versions were typically about one- third as long but offered significant performance gains — two-, three-, or even six-fold speedups. In one instance, the Halide program was actually longer than the original — but the speedup was 70-fold.

Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Andrew Adams, a CSAIL postdoc, led the development of Halide, and they've released the code online.

"I was looking for some easier way to write high performance code for mobile devices, but it turned out to be great for desktops as well," said Andrew Adams.

"Digital-photo files are getting so big that, without a lot of clever software engineering, processing them would take a painfully long time on a desktop computer, let alone a cellphone," Ragan-Kelley explained. "Unfortunately, the tricks that engineers use to speed up their image-processing algorithms make their code almost unreadable, and rarely reusable. Adding a new function to an image-processing program, or modifying it to run on a different device, often requires rethinking and revising it from top to bottom."

Read more -here-

• Google, Meta, Apple receive FCC approval to tap into airwaves for VR and AR
• State-sponsored hackers are leveraging WinRAR bug
• Amazon launches drug delivery by drone
• Unpatched Zero-Day being exploited in the wild, Cisco warns
• Apple plans to update iPhones in-store without opening the boxes
• Microsoft just bought Activision Blizzard for $69 billion