I'm a fresh graduate electronics engineer and I've an experience on computer vision.I want to ask if it's feasible to make a hardware accelerator of SIFT algorithm - or any other openCV algorithms - to be used on smartphones instead of the current software implementation?
What are the advantages (much low computation, lower power, more complex applications will appear, ...) and the disadvantages(isn't better than the current software implementation, ...)?
Do you have an insight of that?
Thanks
You might be interested to check NEON optimizations - a type of SIMD instructions supported by Nvidia Tegra 3 architectures. Some OpenCV functions are NEON optimized.
Start by reading this nice article Realtime Computer Vision with OpenCV, it has performance comparisons about using NEON, etc.
I also recommend you to start here and here, you will find great insights.