efficientimagemanipulation.docVIP

Efficient Image Manipulation via Run-time Compilation Conal Elliott, Oege de Moor*, and Sigbjorn Finne November, 1999 Technical Report MSR-TR-99-82 Microsoft Research Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 Efficient Image Manipulation via Run-time Compilation Conal Elliott, Oege de Moor, and Sigbjorn Finne Abstract An image manipulation system can be thought of as a domain-specific programming language: by composing and manipulating pictures, the user builds up an expression in such a programming language. Each time the picture is displayed, the expression is evaluated. To gain the required efficiency of display, the expression must be optimized and compiled on the fly. This paper introduces a small language that could form the basis of an image manipulation system, and it describes a preliminary implementation. To compile an expression in the language, we inline all function definitions and use algebraic laws of the primitive operations to optimize composites. We apply a form of code motion to recover (as far as possible) the sharing lost in the inlining phase. Finally, we generate intermediate code that is passed to a JIT compiler. Introduction A modern image manipulation application like Adobe Photoshop? or Microsoft PhotoDraw? provides its users with a collection of image operations, and implements these operations by means of a fixed set of precompiled code. This code must be written to handle a variety of image formats and arbitrary combinations of image operations. It is also often augmented by special-purpose code to handle some common cases more efficiently than done by the more general algorithms. Special-casing can only go so far, however, because the user can perform any of an infinite set of combinations, and because the more code the product includes, the less reliable it is and the more demanding of its users’ resources. Consequently, the user gets sub-optimal time and space performance. For example, a user might