Sift on GPU

[Jérôme Kieffer]

Dear Pythonistas,

We are porting the SIFT keypoints extraction algorithm (available from IPOL)
to GPU using PyOpenCL. For the moment, the keypoint location works and
shows a speed-up of 5 to 10x (without tuning so far, vs C++).

A lot of work is remaining, especially:
* limit the memory footprint (700MB/10Mpix image currently)
* calculate the descriptor for each descriptor
* keypoint matching and image alignment.
* best interleave of IO/CPU/GPU
but we managed to port the most trickiest part to OpenCL (without using
textures, which makes it running also on multi-core).

I would like to thank the people who published their algorithm on IPOL;
making unit testing possible.

Last but not least, the code is open source and should have a BSD
licence (even if there is a patent on the algorithm in the USA).
https://github.com/pierrepaleo/sift_pyocl

Cheers,

-- 
Jérôme Kieffer <google at terre-adelie.org>