Performance Measurement and Improvement Techniques

Measuring Performance with OpenCV

Default Optimization in OpenCV

Many of the OpenCV functions are optimized using SSE2, AVX etc. It contains unoptimized code also. So if our system support these features, we should exploit them (almost all modern day processors support them). It is enabled by default while compiling. So OpenCV runs the optimized code if it is enabled, else it runs the unoptimized code. You can use cv2.useOptimized() to check if it is enabled/disabled and cv2.setUseOptimized() to enable/disable it. Let’s see a simple example.

# check if optimization is enabled
In [5]: cv2.useOptimized()
Out[5]: True

In [6]: %timeit res = cv2.medianBlur(img,49)
10 loops, best of 3: 34.9 ms per loop

# Disable it
In [7]: cv2.setUseOptimized(False)

In [8]: cv2.useOptimized()
Out[8]: False

In [9]: %timeit res = cv2.medianBlur(img,49)
10 loops, best of 3: 64.1 ms per loop

See, optimized median filtering is ~2x faster than unoptimized version. If you check its source, you can see median filtering is SIMD optimized. So you can use this to enable optimization at the top of your code (remember it is enabled by default).