Opt: A Domain Specific Language for Non-linear Least Squares Optimization in Graphics and Imaging

Understand

Many graphics and vision problems can be expressed as non-linear least squares optimizations of objective functions over visual data, such as images and meshes.

• The mathematical descriptions of these functions are extremely concise, but their implementation in real code is tedious, especially when optimized for real-time performance on modern GPUs in interactive applications.
• In this work, we propose a new language, Opt (available under http://optlang.org), for writing these objective functions over image- or graph-structured unknowns concisely and at a high level.
• Our compiler automatically transforms these specifications into state-of-the-art GPU solvers based on Gauss-Newton or Levenberg-Marquardt methods.