Duo deliver Halide support for vision processors

Halide is a domain-specific language for imaging and vision applications developed by MIT CSAIL and adopted by leading technology companies for use in their imaging products. This language provides abstractions that allow for rapid development of highly optimised and portable imaging applications.

The CEVA-XM family of imaging and vision processors and platforms have achieved more than 50 design wins to date, with many of the world’s leading OEMs. The CEVA-XM processors power computer vision and computational photography in millions of devices, including smartphones, drones, mirrorless cameras, 360° cameras, action cameras surveillance cameras and VR headsets, and are soon to be deployed in automotive image sensors and ADAS pre-processors.

“Enabling Halide on the CEVA-XM family offers customers a rapid and powerful method of expressing, prototyping, and optimising complex vision and imaging processing pipelines,” said Gary Gitelson, Vice President of Engineering at mPerpetuo. “When using the Halide development environment, programmers can create software with performance that is on-par or exceeds hand-coded assembly or intrinsics, while achieving significantly reduced development times, and improved code consistency and maintainability.”

“Support for Halide will offer significant performance benefits to our customers wishing to write high-performance image processing code for their CEVA-XM powered products,” said Ilan Yona, Vice President and General Manager of the vision business unit at CEVA. “We are pleased to collaborate with mPerpetuo to add support for this exciting new programming language to our industry-leading imaging and vision processors.”

mPerpetuo provides a full Halide language port that can generate CEVA-XM assembly code and a full runtime environment to execute those pipelines on the CEVA-XM hardware. These tools and technologies form the core necessary to develop imaging algorithms targeted at the CEVA-XM using the Halide language. In addition, CEVA and mPerpetuo provide a reference imaging pipeline that can be used as a basis for building custom camera acquisition, display, image processing and vision applications.

This pipeline contains all of the key basic blocks of image processing from raw sensor input to denoised and colour processed final output. It is highly customisable and built in a modular fashion in which new blocks can be added easily, and existing blocks can be modified or replaced as needed according to a customer's design. On top of this baseline image pipeline, mPerpetuo also provides additional visual code generation tools to ease the process of software development with Halide, and consultation in optimising and working with Halide on the CEVA-XM family of products. mPerpetuo and CEVA will join forces to train and enable their joint customers to migrate their ISPs to Halide.