Fast parallel blur detection on GPU

Blur detection, a task to determine whether an image is blurred or not, is very helpful in various applications of image processing and computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel method to accelerate blur detection algorithms based on Haar wavelet transform. The method decouples data dependency to gain fast 3-level Haar wavelet transform. With the obtained independence, the blur detection steps can be performed in parallel using native GPU thread blocks. We evaluated our proposed method on embedded devices, desktop and server. Our experiments show that on desktop and server, the proposed method obtains a huge performance speedup. On embedded devices, our GPU-based 3-level Haar wavelet transform is up to 4.9 times better performance and 4.3 times better power efficiency than CPU-based blur detection algorithms.