OpenCV for DSP/GPU, MSDN equivalent for CCS, and more

• TMS320C6x
• TMS320C54x
• GPGPU
• Imaging

1. A great business opportunity might await anyone brave enough to attempt a port of the OpenCV (Open Computer Vision) library to a DSP platform.  OpenCV is the lingua franca of "industrial grade" image processing, and it's my sense that the DSP imaging libraries out there pale in comparison to the breadth of features offered by OpenCV.  When writing my book for example, I fielded multiple inquiries about making an OpenCV port a centerpiece of the text.  Two problems arise, however.  First and foremost, the scale of this task is fairly large, and is probably why it hasn't been attempted.  In fact there was some measure of effort undertaken to port certain aspects of OpenCV to CUDA, but those efforts appear to have petered out.  Certain image processing "primitives" are just plain difficult to parallelize properly (e.g. connected components).  Secondly, OpenCV is open-source protected by a BSD license, with certain dependencies containing (L)GPL and various other licenses.  Given the fact that coding and testing a reasonably optimized OpenCV port on to a suitable DSP platform would be a non-trivial task, where would the revenue come from -- assuming that the source would have to be released to the public?
2. In early 1990s and prior to that, Windows IDEs were not dominated by a single entity as is now the case (Microsoft Visual Studio rules the roost here, of course).  Back then, a developer could easily choose a compiler/IDE from Borland and not feel left out in the cold.  I think it's fairly evident that one of the major reasons why Visual Studio became thoroughly dominant was the advent of MSDN (Microsoft Developer's Network) and the help system tied into Visual Studio.  This got me thinking -- why is the help in Code Composer Studio so LAME?  Having done significant amounts of programming in both environments, it never ceases to amaze me just how poor the search is in CCS and how I can never find what I'm looking for.  Now even though TI does not have to worry about any competition in the IDE space, think of how much better things would be if the help in CCS was even half as good as the help in Visual Studio.  I haven't done much with the new CCS v4 so I am not aware if this issue has been addressed at all.
3. I just got in my inbox an invitation for a presentation on GPU Computing with ATI Stream Technology on March 9th.  Since I don't know much about Stream aside from what little I've read (and having somewhat disparaged the technology in a previous post) I'm looking forward to this talk and will report back.
4. Without further ado, I have decided on a CUDA project to walk you through the details on this blog!  What I plan on implementing is frequency-domain filtering of images.  More details to follow, but essentially we will multiply the FFT of an image by some mask, then perform the inverse FFT to filter the image.

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