Performance Optimization of Object Tracking Algorithms in OpenCV on GPUs

Machine-learning-based computer vision is increasingly versatile and being leveraged by a wide range of smart devices. Due to the limited performance/energy budget of computing units in smart devices, the careful implementation of computer vision algorithms is critical. In this paper, we analyze the performance bottleneck of two well-known computer vision algorithms for object tracking: object detection and optical flow in the Open-source Computer Vision library (OpenCV). Based on our in-depth analysis of their implementation, we found the current implementation fails to utilize Open Computing Language (OpenCL) accelerators (e.g., GPUs). Based on the analysis, we propose several optimization strategies and apply them to the OpenCL implementation of object tracking algorithms. Our evaluation results demonstrate the performance of the object detection is improved by up to 86% and the performance of the optical flow by up to 10%. We believe our optimization strategies can be applied to other computer vision algorithms implemented in OpenCL.