Motion detection without disk writes - raspberry-pi

I need to take video frames from pi and send them further to zmq socket. These should be filtered to those only where some movement takes place on the scene.
Another requrement is to completely avoid disk writes. My idea is to use Motion and redirect all file output to /dev/shm. My process will read from there
and send further. Motion will be setup to save frames at the rate allowing to handle and remove them before memory is exhausted.
It would be great to have another solution which could give me frames one-by-one through the same process address space.

Related

Where GPU read/write data

I am trying to understand below lines from here
How quickly can data be sent to the GPU or read back from it?
How fast can the GPU kernel read and write data?
How quickly can data be sent to the GPU? Which peripheral device sent data to GPU? Where GPU kernel read and write data? to the data bus?
Is this implementation showing us how everything [GPU and other peripheral devices] contribute towards computation performance?

ALSA passthrough latency

I am working on an embedded Linux application with audio passthrough using ALSA. It has very stringent latency requirements.
The output buffer is as small as possible which results in an occasional (perhaps once an hour) underrun on the output. This is acceptable. However, when it occurs, it causes a "backup" in the capture buffer and the result is a creeping increase in latency.
There doesn't seem to be a reliable way to know how much output data was lost in order to discard the same amount of input. I can experiment, but even though it's an embedded application it needs to be device independent, so we need a reliable solution.
Does anyone know a way to determine how much data was lost, or if it is always one buffer, or have other suggestions?
If you do not want the PCM devices to stop on an underrun/overrun, configure them not to stop by setting the stop threshold to the boundary value. Then they will just continue to run, and the number of available frames will continue to increase (for capture) or decrease (for playback). (Not all of those frames will be usable; the ring buffer just wraps around.)

How to run a multi-queue code using OpenCL?

For example, I'm doing some image processing work on every frame of a video.
Every frame's processing using 200ms including writing, processing and reading.
And the fps is 25, in that case every two frames' distance is 40ms. Then the processing is too slow to show continuous result.
So here is my idea, I use multi-queues for this work.
In CPU part,
while(video is not over)
{
1. read the frame0;
processing the **frame0** using **queue0**;
wait 40 ms;
2. read the frame1;
processing the frame1 using **queue1**;
wait 40 ms;
3.4.5.
...(after 5 frames(just about the 200ms's processing time))
6. download the **frame0**'s result.
7. read the frame5;
processing the frame5 using **queue0**;
wait 40 ms;
...
}
The code means that, I use different queues for reading and processing the same frame in a video.
However, my experiment result is faster, but just 2 times faster, but not in my imaginary speed.
Can anyone tell me how to deal it? THX!
Assuming you have one Device, here are some thoughts on this point:
Main reason to have multiple Command Queues (CQ) per single OpenCL Device is the ability to execute kernels & do IO operations simultaneously.
Usually one CQ is enought to load single Device at ~100%. Though, your multi-CQ idea is good (in my opinion), as you're constantly feeding GPU with workload.
Look at kernel execution time. May be, it's big enough, so that your Device is constantly executing kernels & can't go any faster.
I think, you don't need to wait for 40ms. Good solution is to process frames in queue, in which they are put to eliminate the difference between bitstream & display order.
If you have too many CQ, your OpenCL driver thread will be busy maintaining them, so that performance may decrease.

x264 threading latency

I wonder why sliceless threading (http://akuvian.org/src/x264/sliceless_threads.txt) in x264 leads to latency? If I have for example 2 threads the first encode one frame and the second encode one frame. The seconds have to wait for the first in some cases. But they can be encoded in parallel.
So two threads should be faster than only one, right?
Frame-threading add latency in frames not in seconds because you need to feed encoder with more input frames before you start getting output frames (to fill pipeline). Encoding one frame itself will take about near same processor time as with one thread but threading allow pipeline process by encoding different frames parallel. From other hand sliced-threading decrease latency because all threads encode one frame parallel so it would be finished faster than encoding it with one thread (also sliced-threading don't need latency in frames for pipepining).
It took me quite a while to reason through it, but the answer is Queuing Theory.
Each frame can be started when half of the previous frame has been encoded. But if parallelization is going to provide any benefit most (preferably all) threads should have a frame to work on. 5 threads means 5 frames. That is the pipeline. Any time the pipeline is not completely full, parallelization is giving you less of a benefit. If the pipeline contains only one frame, only one thread is working and therefore you get no benefit from parallelization. But if your pipeline is usually full, what is it full of? Unencoded frames. Unencoded frames are frames that must have been captured and therefore they represent that many frames worth of latency. The latency might be slightly less by a small constant portion of a frame because some of those frames in the pipeline are partially encoded but in general each item in the pipeline contributes to the latency.
One reason for added latency with more threads is that the consecutive frames use each other for motion prediction and compensation. That means in order to compress a frame you need info from previous motion estimation details. That means the frames are dependant on each other and sometimes they have to wait for at least some data from other threads as well. This is in contrast with the slice threading when threads slicing up the frame and each one works on one slice and all on the same frame and they have all the needed info from previous frames, or next in case of B frames.

Communication between processor and high speed perihperal

Considering that a processor runs at 100 MHz and the data is coming to the processor from an external device/peripheral at the rate of 1000 Mbit/s (8 Bits/Clockcycle # 125 MHz), which is the best way to handle traffic that comes at a higher speed to the processor ?
First off, you can't do it in software. There would be no way to sample the digital lines at a sufficient rate, or to doing anything useful with it.
You need to use a hardware FIFO buffer or memory cell. When a data burst comes in, it can be buffered in the high speed FIFO and then read out as needed by the processor.
Drop in high speed FIFO chips are surprisingly expensive (though most are dual ported). To cut cost, you would be best off using an SRAM chip, and a hardware adder to increment the address lines on incoming data.
This is not an uncommon situation for software. semaj said the right word. This is a system engineering issue. Other folks have the right answer too. If you want to look at or process that data with the 100MHz processor, it is not going to happen, dont bother trying. You CAN look at snapshots of it or have the hardware filter out a specific percentage of it that you are looking for. At the end of the day though it is a systems issue, what does the hardware provide, where does it put this data, what is the softwares task for this data, does it see X buffers of data come in on the goesinta, and the notify the goesouta hardware that there are X buffers ready to go? Does the hardware examine and align the buffers so that you can look at a header, and then decide where to route the hardware? Once you do your system engineering you will know if you can use that processor or not, and if you can use it what its job is and how to do it.
Your direct question. What is the best way to handle it. The best way to handle it is to have hardware (fpga, asic, etc) move it into and out of some storage device (ram of some sort probably). Not necessarily the same ram the processor runs out of (DMA is a good thing to avoid). The hardware is something the software can talk to but you cannot examine all of that data so dont try. Without knowing what kind of data this is, what form, what the software looks at how much work you are willing to force the hardware to do, etc determines the rest of the answer. If you expect a certain (guaranteed) percentage to be bad or not belong to this processor, etc have the hardware filter that out and then what is left you can process.
Networking is a good example of this, PCs have gige ports but cannot process GigE line rate data. That is why we use switches now instead of hubs, hardware slices out a percentage of the data so the pc can handle it, the protocols take care of the data that cannot be processed by resending it later. And the switches processors dont look at all of the data, the hardware slices it up so the software can examine just the header. Or sometimes the software simply manages tables that drive the hardware and the hardware does all the work of processing the data.
Do your system engineering the answers will simply fall out.
You buffer it. Typically data from a device is written to a memory buffer (circular queue) using DMA (no cpu involved). The cpu reads from the memory buffer at a constant rate. Usually devices send data in bursts. This keeps the buffer from filling up. If there is too much data, buffer overflow.
DMA (direct memory access) is possibly the solution, however, it seems unlikely that the memory bus could run faster than the processor core, so the receiving peripheral would have to accept data into a larger register than 8 bit because 125MHz could not be sustained. For example a 16bit register would allow memory writes at 62.5MHz which may be achievable. Also the receiving device would have to be able to accept an external clock that is both faster and asynchronous to the core clock. Also of course the receiving peripheral must have support for DMA.
Unless you are more specific about your hardware and the communication protocol it is difficult to give anything other than a general answer.