Mobile image analysis: Android vs. iOS

Abstract

Currently, computer vision applications are becoming more common on mobile devices due to the constant increase in raw processing power coupled with extended battery life. The OpenCV framework is a popular choice when developing such applications on desktop computers as well as on mobile devices, but there are few comparative performance studies available. We know of only one such study that evaluates a set of typical OpenCV operations on iOS devices. In this paper we look at the same operations, spanning from simple image manipulation like grayscaling and blurring to keypoint detection and descriptor extraction but on flagship Android devices as well as on iOS devices and with different image resolutions. We compare the results of the same tests running on the two platforms on the same datasets and provide extended measurements on completion time and battery usage.