Intel Begins Working On A Vulkan Compute Back-End For OpenCV Library

As perhaps a sign of where Intel is heading for their GPU computing strategy with their in-development discrete GPUs, they are developing a Vulkan compute back-end for the widely-used OpenCV library. This Vulkan back-end is for handling GPU-based compute for neural networks with this Open Computer Vision library as an alternative to the CUDA and OpenCL GPU compute support.

At this stage the Vulkan back-end they are looking to merge into OpenCV can handle convolution, Concat, ReLU, LRN, PriorBox, Softmax, MaxPooling, AvePooling, and Permute. Other layer types are planned moving forward as well as more performance tuning.

This is one of the most interesting uses of Vulkan compute we've seen thus far. The initial pull request for this preliminary Vulkan back-end for OpenCV was issued this weekend on GitHub.