Accelerating OpenVG with multimedia processors on mobile phones

Abstract

Various handheld devices, in the first place mobile phones, have strong needs regarding 2D vector & bitmap graphics capabilities, including high performance and quality requirements. OpenVG is one of widely used low-level 2D vector graphics API's. Currently, fully dedicated OpenVG semiconductor chips are relatively expensive and require high power consumption. In contrast, full software implementations show lower performance even with almost 100% of CPU usage, which would disrupt other concurrent applications. In this paper, we present a new cost-effective way of accelerating OpenVG, based on wide-spread and inexpensive multimedia-processing hardwares, presently on the mobile phones. Through an extensive use of these multimedia processors, we successfully accelerated our AlexVG, an OpenVG software-based implementation, especially on its fundamental OpenVG features: bit-block transfer, masking, scissoring, color conversion, image transformation, etc. This accelerated implementation comes with a lower power consumption. It exhibits appropriate performance, reaching more than 20 frames per second, even for complicated graphical user experiences. Its CPU utilization ranges from 20% to 30%, while the remaining CPU power remains available for other real-time tasks and user applications. This implementation is now commercially available and used in several mid-tier mobile phones.