Will Perl be the bottleneck in this kind of image processing?

Question

The processing I have in mind is this:

• there are thousands of png files
• each of them should be loaded, and its pixels accessed
• each pixel's channels will be processed in some way, and then written to a binary file

I was thinking of using some sort of module, like ImageMagick wrappers, or some other wrapper for a C image processing backend. Will Perl slow me down if I choose it to implement this task? I have a tool already that's written in Java ( it uses JDK's BufferedImage ), and it's reasonably fast. Would I be crazy to expect the same speed from Perl?

Answer 1

I don't think so, unless your Perl code is over-reliant on method calls in a tight loop. But if the actual image processing is done in C backend, Perl will not be a bottleneck performance-wise.

Answer 2

The answer depends on what is limiting performance in the Java version. If you're limited by file I/O (including .png decompression), then moving to Perl will probably be fine. Otherwise, you're likely to pay a steep performance penalty for processing each pixel in Perl, but if you can call C routines to process entire images, you're likely to be just as fast (possibly faster, depending on the relative performance of the C and Java libraries).

So, in brief: if Perl must touch pixels, it will be slow. If Perl touches images and C touches pixels, it's probably fine.

Answer 3

If you're using ImageMagick, or other any other C-based processing tool, perl will most certainly not be the bottleneck. The bottlenecks I could see (especially if processing thousands of files) would be:

• Disk IO speeds
• Memory access speeds
• Library algorithm speed

Perl will make a great glue for doing what you want. The slow parts will still be slow. You might as well make the fast parts easy. :)

Also, remember the two Rules of Optimization:

1. Don't do it.
2. (For experts only: ) Don't do it yet.

When you do get it put together, run a profiler on it. If and when that becomes your goal, check out:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Devel-NYTProf

Devel::NYTProf is pretty much the bee's knees when it comes to profiling tools. It'll show you exactly where your slowdowns are, so you don't just have a "warm fuzzy" feeling that you have it right...you'll know for sure.

Answer 4

Yes, I expect the performance of a perl implementation would be incredibly sucky at pixel-level image manipulation.

Yes, you could do it, but Perl's data structures don't lend themselves to this kind of thing. If you were using a library where you don't need to make 1x call per pixel, you'll be fine though.