Is OpenCv already threaded?

Question

I want to use OpenCV in order to record a video and send it as a stream. I'm a beginner and I need to know if OpenCV blocks the main thread or is it threaded itself ?

I read OpenCV documentation (2.4.9) and I couldn't find any answer.

Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

OpenCV can spawn threads when you call a function. However, all the work is performed before control is returned to the calling thread. For a number of reasons, asynchronous processing would add a substantial extra bit of complexity. (Consider, for instance: How would your program know when the computation was done?) It would also introduce some undesired overhead if the program didn't need to be asynchronous.

You can do asynchronous processing yourself with a minimal amount of effort, though, with C++11's threading API.

Answer 2

OpenCV can be built with OpenMP support to make the compute functions use all the available cores on your machine. It can be built also with OpenCL and CUDA. In addition it has sorts of SIMD optimization flags.

If you don't build it with such support it will run single threaded.

In either versions, calling an OpenCV function blocks the launcher thread until it computes all the operations. That is true even when offloading the computation to a GPU.