Fast multidimensional binary image processing with OpenCL

Abstract

Binary images are often used in image processing pipelines, and are usually stored in the unpacked format, i.e., 8 bits per pixel. The packed format uses 1 bit per pixel, 8 times less memory, and is a good option when dealing with images too big to fit in RAM. This paper presents a parallel implementation of pixelwise and window operators for packed binary images. The implementation, written in OpenCL, can run in GPUs or multiple core CPUs. The proposed Destination Word Accumulation (DWA) implementation of morphological operations is faster than Leptonica in 2D and up to two orders of magnitude faster than Python and MATLAB in 1D to 5D.