Khronos to initiate acceleration API for CV apps

MANHASSET, NY -- The Khronos Group announced a new initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform acceleration of computer vision applications. 

Khronos has created a vision working group to develop a hardware acceleration API using the Khronos development process and aiming for a first public release within 12 months.

Computer vision systems require hardware accelerated vision algorithms to work in real-time. Multiple hardware vendors have developed proprietary accelerated computer vision libraries leading to market fragmentation.

The Khronos vision working group will drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API standard to enable hardware vendors to implement and optimize accelerated computer vision algorithms.

The Khronos vision API will be able to accelerate high-level libraries, such as the OpenCV open source vision library, or be used by applications directly. The vision API will also explore interoperability with existing Khronos standards for camera control, video processing, compute acceleration and graphics rendering.

The working group's task is enable computer vision on mobile and embedded systems and enable acceleration on a wide variety of computing architectures including CPUs, GPUs and DSPs.
 
"Computer vision will be central to enabling consumers to use and interact with their computing devices in compelling and magical ways - but this emerging market opportunity needs a firm foundation of cross-platform vision acceleration," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, in a statement.

Interested companies can join Khronos to make contributions, influence the direction of the specification and gain early access to draft specifications before public release. 

The vision working group will commence work in January 2012.

The Khronos Group industry consortium creates open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.
Khronos to initiate acceleration API for CV apps