new open source library ogles_gpgpu: GPGPU for Android and iOS using OpenGL ES 2.0

I would like to announce a new library for GPU-based processing on mobile systems – ogles_gpgpu.

As many of you know, it is often beneficial in terms of performance and energy efficiency to execute certain processing tasks on the GPU instead of the CPU. This is especially the case for image processing tasks. ogles_gpgpu enables fast and portable, GPU-powered processing by using OpenGL ES 2.0 shaders.

Since transferring data to and from the GPU is often a bottleneck for GPU processing, platform-specific fast texture access is also implemented. The library is written in well documented, clear C++ code. An interface for Android systems via JNI is provided. Example applications show how to use this library. All code is LGPL licensed.

There are several scenarios on how to use this library: You can for example pass image data (or arbitrary byte data) to ogles_gpgpu, which creates an OpenGL texture from it. You can then process it on the GPU by applying a series of filters (OpenGL shaders) on it. This kind of rendering happens off-screen. Afterwards, you can lock the result data and obtain a pointer to it. You can then copy this data for future processing or directly analyze or modify it. Another possible scenario is to directly pass an OpenGL texture ID as input for ogles_gpgpu. This is for example beneficial if you can obtain camera frames as OpenGL texture from the camera API of your target platform (both Android and iOS allow this and example projects or provided for this). Now ogles_gpgpu can directly run the filters on this camera frame texture. This can happen off-screen or optionally on-screen, which means that the result image is also displayed to a render surface. After processing on the GPU side, you can access the result data again as described in the first scenario. By this, you can do further CPU-based processing of the result data. This is for example necessary, if certain algorithms can not (efficiently) be implemented as OpenGL shaders.

At current development stage, there are not so many image processing filters implemented, yet, but this is about to change in the future. The most important thing is that a portable architecture for GPU-based processing is available, which allows fast texture access by using platform-specific optimizations.

You can check out the project on github: github.com/internaut/ogles_gpgpu
More information can be found on my personal website: admin edit:external links are forbidden
(I'm sorry but since I'm a new forum member, I may not post links to external sites so you have to copy & paste the above links...)

— modified on Jan 10, 2015, 7:02:19 PM by moderator