Generic software framework for a line-buffer-based image processing pipeline

The majority of the current affordable mobile devices contain a camera with simple optics and a low-cost camera sensor. In these devices, the quality of the captured images is made acceptable with various image processing algorithms that together form an image reconstruction pipeline. The best performance is often achieved with a hardware pipeline, but software implementations can be preferred to minimize production costs and to maximize flexibility. This paper presents a generic software framework for a line-buffer-based image reconstruction pipeline. The presented framework is capable of operating in low-memory environments and significantly eases algorithm insertions, changes of processing order, and other pipeline management tasks. The savings in development time can be even months. In addition, our experiments show that it offers over 99% memory savings compared with traditional implementations using a ping-pong buffer scheme with full-sized image buffers. The implemented framework also enhances processing performance due to better cache usage and increases flexibility with various pipeline configurations.