Thursday 1 December 2016

Running Intel TBB On a Raspberry Pi

The usefulness of Raspberry Pis seems almost limitless, with new applications being introduced daily and with no end in sight. But, as versatile as they are, it’s no secret that Raspberry Pis are still lacking in pure processing power. So, some serious optimization is needed to squeeze as much power out of the Raspberry Pi as possible when you’re working on processor-intensive projects.

This simplest way to accomplish this optimization, of course, is to simply reduce what’s running down to the essentials. For example, there’s no sense in running a GUI if your project doesn’t even use a display. Another strategy, however, is to ensure that you’re actually using all of the available processing power that the Raspberry Pi offers. In [sagiz’s] case, that meant using Intel’s open source Threading Building Blocks to achieve better parallelism in his OpenCV project.

As you’re probably guessing, this wasn’t as easy as just typing “apt-get install tbb” into the terminal. That’s because Intel TBB wasn’t available in Raspbian, due to the difficulty of creating a build to run on ARM. But, [sagiz] was able to create a working build, and has made it available on his project page. Using his new build, he was able to increase OpenCV speed by 30%, which is definitely a non-trivial amount!

If you’re looking to get started with OpenCV on the Raspberry Pi, be sure to check out this guide. which will get you of to a grand start.


Filed under: ARM, Raspberry Pi

Read the full article here by Hack a Day

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