Efficient Implementation of Image Warping on a Multimedia Processor.

The spatial transformation of images, commonly known as image warping, is fundamental to many applications, e.g., remote sensing, medical imaging, computer vision, and computer graphics. Computational demands in image warping are high, requiring a geometric transformation, address and coefficient generation, and some form of interpolation. However, unlike most image processing algorithms, the data flow for image warping can be highly irregular, which makes any efficient implementation challenging. This paper describes an efficient algorithm which addresses these challenges by making use of the capabilities of a single-chip multiprocessing microprocessor, the Texas Instruments TMS320C80 MVP Multimedia Video Processor. The MVPs advanced digital signal processors ADSPs offer tremendous computational power through instruction-level parallelism and several key features designed for image processing. The MVPs intelligent inputoutput interface via the Transfer Controller TC permits efficient irregular memory accesses. Affine and perspective warps have been implemented for 8-bit, 16-bit, and RGB color data using bilinear interpolation. The affine warp can generate 512 x 512 warped output images faster than real-time video rates require. For 8-bit images, the performance is 14.1 ms. Although the amount of computation necessary is the same for 16-bit images, the execution time increases to 15.2 ms since twice as many bytes need to be transferred. For RGB color images, it takes 28.0 ms. The perspective warp requires 46.3 ms for 8-bit and 16-bit images, and 60.4 ms for RGB color images. This unprecedented performance for software-based image warping exceeds many hardwired approaches reported in the literature.