Separable gaussian blur - optimize vertical pass - image-processing

Question

I have implemented separable Gaussian blur. Horizontal pass was relatively easy to optimize with SIMD processing. However, I am not sure how to optimize vertical pass.
Accessing elements is not very cache friendly and filling SIMD lane would mean reading many different pixels. I was thinking about transpose the image and run horizontal pass and then transpose image back, however, I am not sure if it will gain any improvement because of two tranpose operations.
I have quite large images 16k resolution and kernel size is 19, so vectorization of vertical pass gain was about 15%.
My Vertical pass is as follows (it is sinde generic class typed to T which can be uint8_t or float):
int yStart = kernelHalfSize;
int xStart = kernelHalfSize;
int yEnd = input.GetWidth() - kernelHalfSize;
int xEnd = input.GetHeigh() - kernelHalfSize;
const T * inData = input.GetData().data();
V * outData = output.GetData().data();
int kn = kernelHalfSize * 2 + 1;
int kn4 = kn - kn % 4;
for (int y = yStart; y < yEnd; y++)
{
size_t yW = size_t(y) * output.GetWidth();
size_t outX = size_t(xStart) + yW;
size_t xEndSimd = xStart;
int len = xEnd - xStart;
len = len - len % 4;
xEndSimd = xStart + len;
for (int x = xStart; x < xEndSimd; x += 4)
{
size_t inYW = size_t(y) * input.GetWidth();
size_t x0 = ((x + 0) - kernelHalfSize) + inYW;
size_t x1 = x0 + 1;
size_t x2 = x0 + 2;
size_t x3 = x0 + 3;
__m128 sumDot = _mm_setzero_ps();
int i = 0;
for (; i < kn4; i += 4)
{
__m128 kx = _mm_set_ps1(kernelDataX[i + 0]);
__m128 ky = _mm_set_ps1(kernelDataX[i + 1]);
__m128 kz = _mm_set_ps1(kernelDataX[i + 2]);
__m128 kw = _mm_set_ps1(kernelDataX[i + 3]);
__m128 dx, dy, dz, dw;
if constexpr (std::is_same<T, uint8_t>::value)
{
//we need co convert uint8_t inputs to float
__m128i u8_0 = _mm_loadu_si128((const __m128i*)(inData + x0));
__m128i u8_1 = _mm_loadu_si128((const __m128i*)(inData + x1));
__m128i u8_2 = _mm_loadu_si128((const __m128i*)(inData + x2));
__m128i u8_3 = _mm_loadu_si128((const __m128i*)(inData + x3));
__m128i u32_0 = _mm_unpacklo_epi16(
_mm_unpacklo_epi8(u8_0, _mm_setzero_si128()),
_mm_setzero_si128());
__m128i u32_1 = _mm_unpacklo_epi16(
_mm_unpacklo_epi8(u8_1, _mm_setzero_si128()),
_mm_setzero_si128());
__m128i u32_2 = _mm_unpacklo_epi16(
_mm_unpacklo_epi8(u8_2, _mm_setzero_si128()),
_mm_setzero_si128());
__m128i u32_3 = _mm_unpacklo_epi16(
_mm_unpacklo_epi8(u8_3, _mm_setzero_si128()),
_mm_setzero_si128());
dx = _mm_cvtepi32_ps(u32_0);
dy = _mm_cvtepi32_ps(u32_1);
dz = _mm_cvtepi32_ps(u32_2);
dw = _mm_cvtepi32_ps(u32_3);
}
else
{
/*
//load 8 consecutive values
auto dd = _mm256_loadu_ps(inData + x0);
//extract parts by shifting and casting to 4 values float
dx = _mm256_castps256_ps128(dd);
dy = _mm256_castps256_ps128(_mm256_permutevar8x32_ps(dd, _mm256_set_epi32(0, 0, 0, 0, 4, 3, 2, 1)));
dz = _mm256_castps256_ps128(_mm256_permutevar8x32_ps(dd, _mm256_set_epi32(0, 0, 0, 0, 5, 4, 3, 2)));
dw = _mm256_castps256_ps128(_mm256_permutevar8x32_ps(dd, _mm256_set_epi32(0, 0, 0, 0, 6, 5, 4, 3)));
*/
dx = _mm_loadu_ps(inData + x0);
dy = _mm_loadu_ps(inData + x1);
dz = _mm_loadu_ps(inData + x2);
dw = _mm_loadu_ps(inData + x3);
}
//calculate 4 dots at once
//[dx, dy, dz, dw] <dot> [kx, ky, kz, kw]
auto mx = _mm_mul_ps(dx, kx); //dx * kx
auto my = _mm_fmadd_ps(dy, ky, mx); //mx + dy * ky
auto mz = _mm_fmadd_ps(dz, kz, my); //my + dz * kz
auto res = _mm_fmadd_ps(dw, kw, mz); //mz + dw * kw
sumDot = _mm_add_ps(sumDot, res);
x0 += 4;
x1 += 4;
x2 += 4;
x3 += 4;
}
for (; i < kn; i++)
{
auto v = _mm_set_ps1(kernelDataX[i]);
auto v2 = _mm_set_ps(
*(inData + x3), *(inData + x2),
*(inData + x1), *(inData + x0)
);
sumDot = _mm_add_ps(sumDot, _mm_mul_ps(v, v2));
x0++;
x1++;
x2++;
x3++;
}
sumDot = _mm_mul_ps(sumDot, _mm_set_ps1(weightX));
if constexpr (std::is_same<V, uint8_t>::value)
{
__m128i asInt = _mm_cvtps_epi32(sumDot);
asInt = _mm_packus_epi32(asInt, asInt);
asInt = _mm_packus_epi16(asInt, asInt);
uint32_t res = _mm_cvtsi128_si32(asInt);
((uint32_t *)(outData + outX))[0] = res;
outX += 4;
}
else
{
float tmpRes[4];
_mm_store_ps(tmpRes, sumDot);
outData[outX + 0] = tmpRes[0];
outData[outX + 1] = tmpRes[1];
outData[outX + 2] = tmpRes[2];
outData[outX + 3] = tmpRes[3];
outX += 4;
}
}
for (int x = xEndSimd; x < xEnd; x++)
{
int kn = kernelHalfSize * 2 + 1;
const T * v = input.GetPixelStart(x - kernelHalfSize, y);
float tmp = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < kn; i++)
{
tmp += kernelDataX[i] * v[i];
}
tmp *= weightX;
outData[outX] = ImageUtils::clamp_cast<V>(tmp);
outX++;
}
}

Answer 1

There’s a well-known trick for that.
While you compute both passes, read them sequentially, use SIMD to compute, but write out the result into another buffer, transposed, using scalar stores. Protip: SSE 4.1 has _mm_extract_ps just don’t forget to cast your destination image pointer from float* into int*. Another thing about these stores, I would recommend using _mm_stream_si32 for that as you want maximum cache space used by your input data. When you’ll be computing the second pass, you’ll be reading sequential memory addresses again, the prefetcher hardware will deal with the latency.
This way both passes will be identical, I usually call same function twice, with different buffers.
Two transposes caused by your 2 passes cancel each other. Here’s an HLSL version, BTW.
There’s more. If your kernel size is only 19, that fits in 3 AVX registers. I think shuffle/permute/blend instructions are still faster than even L1 cache loads, i.e. it might be better to load the kernel outside the loop.