Extending halide to improve software development for imaging DSPs

Specialized Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) play an important role in power-efficient, high-performance image processing. However, developing applications for DSPs is more time-consuming and error-prone than for general-purpose processors. Halide is a domain-specific language (DSL) which enables low-effort development of portable, high-performance imaging pipelines. We propose a set of extensions to Halide to support DSPs in combination with arbitrary C compilers, including a template solution to support scratchpad memories. Using a commercial DSP, we demonstrate that this solution can achieve performance within 20% of highly tuned C code, while leading to a reduction in development time and code complexity