Intel Architecture Code Analyzer

Intel provides a great tool for static code analysis of C++ code at assembly-code-level. It is called the Intel Architecture Code Analyzer and will allow you to analyze how instructions are executed on an Intel CPU (including instruction pairing and the critical path).

Bilinear Pixel Interpolation using SSE

Bilinear pixel interpolation is a common operation in image processing applications (resizing, distorting, etc.) as well as in computer graphics (texturing, etc.). It allows accessing pixels at non-integer coordinates of the underlying image by building a weighted sum over all neighbors of the specified image position. On GPUs this operation is implemented in hardware. However, some algorithms can not be ported to the GPU easily and a CPU implementation of the Bilinear interpolation is needed.

This article will show how to efficiently implement such an operation in C++ using SSE2 instructions for 8-bit RGBA images. First, we will show how to perform bilinear interpolation using pure C++ code and then present an enhanced example where we utilize SSE intrinsics.