Imagination introduces the PowerVR Imaging Framework for Android

     Imagination Technologies introduces the new PowerVR Imaging Framework for Android: It is a software component that takes full advantage of the inherent low-power parallel computing features of the PowerVR Rogue GPU, enabling Oems to integrate the latest computational photography and computer vision capabilities into their camera applications.

     Advanced visual and computational photography features, including HDR(high dynamic range), panoramic stitching, manual identification, and augmented reality, require significant processing power. Today, most Oems still rely on CPU/DSP cores to meet this performance requirement, but due to the device's thermal limitations, these processors are unable to provide stable video-grade processing for HD content.

     The massive parallel processing architecture of Gpus is well suited to many image processing algorithms. The PowerVR Imaging Framework tightly integrates Gpus with other system components such as camera sensors, ISPs (image signal processors), cpus, and other specific SoC hardware to create a programmable image processing pipeline that can be easily built into OEM camera applications. With the power consumption and performance efficiency of PowerVR Gpus, Imagination's OEM partners now have the ability to build new SoCs before they have a dedicated hardware design. Pioneered the deployment of advanced video features in camera applications - all within the limited power budget of smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices.

     Peter McGuinness, Director of Multimedia Technology Sales at Imagination, said: "With PowerVR's Imaging Framework, we can help our customers and their Oems easily differentiate their camera applications with their existing SOCs, without any additional hardware costs."

     Kai Pang, senior product Manager at Asus, said: "Imagination's PowerVR graphics technology can provide better features for mass market products and make them accessible to more consumers."

     The PowerVR Imaging Framework for Android includes a set of software extensions to the OpenCL and EGL application program interfaces (apis). Effective zero-copy sampling of YUV and RGB camera data is possible. For example, this extension can directly process the YUV data format to speed up algorithms that only work with luminance data. Another extension software can be used to configure the hardware to dynamically convert YUV data to RGB when sampling.

     The architecture also includes low-level functionality to integrate these zero-copy extension software within the camera HAL(Hardware abstraction layer). When integrated, these extensions can be used to overcome any limitations of the camera lens, ISP(Image Signal Processor) hardware combination, or Android camera application. Customers have taken advantage of the zero-copy capability in the architecture to build accelerated visual applications that do not require any additional coherency hardware.

     Imagination is working with a number of software partners to help them showcase new computational photography and vision solutions, some of which will be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). With deep knowledge of image processors, Gpus, video encoders and embedded cpus, and expertise in heterogeneous processing and computing apis, including OpenCL, RenderScript and OpenGL ES 3.0, as well as emerging visual application apis such as OpenVX, Imagination is uniquely positioned to help our partners develop innovative vision systems.

     McGuinness added: "We have made this graphics platform available to key partners in line with our initial usage plans. I am very pleased to see that our software partners have made significant progress in building a strong vision ecosystem for PowerVR computing technology."

     Michael Minkevich, Vice President of Technical Services at Luxoft, said: "Imagination's Imaging Framework allows us to effectively build a variety of computational photography technologies, including denoising, architecture and detail enhancement, and HDR, on Gpus to deliver maximum value to PowerVR users. The reference camera demonstration application included in the Imaging Framework enables us to demonstrate near-commercial solutions to end-use Oems."