Raspberry Pi SBCs Get OpenVX 1.3 Support for Low-Power High-Performance Computer Vision Applications
New fully-conformant API implementation offers cross-platform computer vision acceleration, no royalties required.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that its eponymous single-board computer family now includes support for the Khronos Group's OpenVX 1.3 computer vision acceleration application programming interface (API) — work carried out alongside the addition of Vulkan graphics API support.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has been working hard on opening up the graphics hardware, always a key feature of the single-board computer family, given its origins as a board based around a system-on-chip designed for multimedia set-top boxes: Earlier this year the not-for-profit announced the ongoing development of an open source Vulkan graphics driver for the VideoCore VI on the Raspberry Pi 4, while a community effort is bringing uncertified support to older VideoCore IV-based boards.
Now, the Foundation has announced something for those who like to use graphics processors for things other than 3D rendering and video playback: Support for the OpenVX 1.3 API.
"The Khronos Group and Raspberry Pi have come together to work on an open source implementation of OpenVX 1.3, which passes the conformance on Raspberry Pi," explains Kiriti Nagesh Gowda of the work. "The open source implementation passes the Vision, Enhanced Vision, and Neural Net conformance profiles specified in OpenVX 1.3 on Raspberry Pi."
"OpenVX enables a performance and power-optimized computer vision processing, especially important in embedded and real-time use cases such as face, body, and gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), object and scene reconstruction, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics, and more. The developers can take advantage of using this robust API in their application and know that the application is portable across all the conformant hardware."
The announcement comes with instructions for building the Khronos Group's OpenVX 1.3, including the conformance test suite, directly on a Raspberry Pi 4 board from the official GitHub sources; a separate repository includes sample code for testing the API out directly. Support has been confirmed for the VideoCore VI-based Raspberry Pi 4 family, including the new 8GB model, and the VideoCore IV-based Raspberry Pi 3 range.
More details can be found on the official announcement.