There comes a time in most complex programs where you want to ask a simple question like, ‘have I already processed a string with this id’? Linear searches through an array are easy to write and work well enough for small array sizes. Plus, the memory overhead of linear searches is fantastic, since it basically has none. But when your arrays can contain many elements, it is time to ditch those linear searches and go with an ordered map or unordered map. Continue reading ‘Ordered map vs. Unordered map – A Performance Study’ »
Archive for the ‘C++’ Category
I was fairly young when I first learned C++. It quickly became my favorite language by such a wide margin, that for many years, I shunned all other programming languages. For me, C++ was easy, high performance, portable, and powerful. Fast forward about 15 years, and here we are today. I was tasked with writing a fairly sophisticated web automation tool for a startup company. The tool needed to be ready as soon as possible, and that is how my journey to C#. Continue reading ‘My transition from C++ to C#’ »
Image processing doesn’t always have to do with scientific computing. Image processing techniques can easily be applied to create artistic filters capable of producing art that would be impossible or difficult for a human to recreate by hand. Previously, I wrote about an algorithm that can make an image look like an oil painting. In this article, I’ll be discussing an algorithm that can be used to roughly simulate what an image would look like if it were in stained glass. Continue reading ‘Stained Glass Algorithm’ »
In memory image compression is essential for any type of visual computing application. Images alone can take a good amount of memory, and when creating an application which uses many images, you may soon find yourself using several gigabytes of memory. While this may be fine for your personal workstation, it may not be okay if you intend to release your application to the public. To work around this memory consumption problem, you’ll want to use in-memory image compression techniques to reduce your program’s memory footprint. Continue reading ‘In Memory Image Compression tutorial’ »
When performing image transformation and manipulation techniques, it is often necessary to employ some sort of interpolation or filtering in order to obtain a good image quality. For example, if you scale an image, you can determine the final color of each pixel by either some basic nearest neighbor method, or a more advanced interpolation method. However, an interpolation method will invariably offer better final image quality. In this tutorial, we’ll be writing a function to rotate an image, using bilinear interpolation. This tutorial also demonstrates how to perform a high quality image rotate transformation, however, that is not the focus of this tutorial, but rather the example transform being performed. Continue reading ‘Coding Bilinear Interpolation’ »
In a previous article about image processing with SSE, we used some basic SSE intrinsics to perform a very easy image manipulation routine, removing all blue from an image. This task was easy, since each pixel was 8 bits per component, with 4 components (ARGB). However, for more advanced image processing functions such as 2D convolution, it is preferable to work with each color component as a 32-bit floating point number rather than an 8-bit unsigned integer. Continue reading ‘Advanced Image Processing with SSE’ »
Image warps and other distortions are significantly more complicated than simple image processing techniques such as convolution. This tutorial will cover how to twist an image in the center. This exact code can be modified to do twists or other types of image warps. Continue reading ‘Image twist and swirl algorithm’ »
Using SSE to process images or video is essential to achieving good performance. Most popular multimedia applications use SSE to greatly accelerate application performance. Unfortunately, like everything in life, if SSE is used incorrectly it can actually perform worse than non-SSE code. This article will take you through some code and discuss the performance of each. Continue reading ‘Image Processing with SSE’ »
If you use Microsoft’s Visual Studio to develop your applications, chances are you either have the express or professional editions, which are free or $549 respectively. Unfortunately, neither of these editions comes with a code profiler! Instead, if you want to use a built-in code profiler for Visual Studio out of the box, you’ll need to have either the premium or ultimate edition for $5,469 or $11,899 respectively. No joke! Luckily, you don’t need to use Visual Studio’s built-in profiler to effectively and easily profile your code.
Continue reading ‘How to profile C++ code in Visual Studio for free’ »