OpenVL: Towards A Novel Software Architecture for Computer Vision

This paper presents our progress on OpenVL -a novel software architecture to address efficiency through facilitating hardware acceleration, reusability and scalability for computer vision. A logical image understanding pipeline is introduced to allow parallel processing. As well, we discuss our middleware -VLUT that enables applications to operate transparently over a heterogeneous collection of hardware implementations. OpenVL works as a state machine, with an event-driven mechanism to provide users with application-level interaction. Various explicit or implicit synchronization and communication methods are supported among distributed processes in the logical pipelines. The intent of OpenVL is to allow users to quickly and easily recover useful information from multiple scenes across various software environments and hardware platforms. We implement two different human tracking systems to validate the critical underlying concepts of OpenVL.