Speeding up access to a array with pointers in C++ - c++

Question

I am trying to make a fast image threshold function. Currently what I do is:
void threshold(const cv::Mat &input, cv::Mat &output, uchar threshold) {
int rows = input.rows;
int cols = input.cols;
// cv::Mat for result
output.create(rows, cols, CV_8U);
if(input.isContinuous()) { //we have to make sure that we are dealing with a continues memory chunk
const uchar* p;
for (int r = 0; r < rows; ++r) {
p = input.ptr<uchar>(r);
for (int c = 0; c < cols; ++c) {
if(p[c] >= threshold)
//how to access output faster??
output.at<uchar>(r,c) = 255;
else
output.at<uchar>(r,c) = 0;
}
}
}
}
I know that the at() function is quite slow. How can I set the output faster, or in other words how to relate the pointer which I get from the input to the output?

Answer 1

You are thinking of at as the C++ standard library documents it for a few containers, performing a range check and throwing if out of bounds, however this is not the standard library but OpenCV.
According to the cv::Mat::at documentation:
The template methods return a reference to the specified array element. For the sake of higher performance, the index range checks are only performed in the Debug configuration.
So there's no range check as you may be thinking.
Comparing both cv::Mat::at and cv::Mat::ptr in the source code we can see they are almost identical.
So cv::Mat::ptr<>(row) is as expensive as
return (_Tp*)(data + step.p[0] * y);
While cv::Mat::at<>(row, column) is as expensive as:
return ((_Tp*)(data + step.p[0] * i0))[i1];
You might want to take cv::Mat::ptr directly instead of calling cv::Mat::at every column to avoid further repetition of the data + step.p[0] * i0 operation, doing [i1] by yourself.
So you would do:
/* output.create and stuff */
const uchar* p, o;
for (int r = 0; r < rows; ++r) {
p = input.ptr<uchar>(r);
o = output.ptr<uchar>(r); // <-----
for (int c = 0; c < cols; ++c) {
if(p[c] >= threshold)
o[c] = 255;
else
o[c] = 0;
}
}
As a side note you don't and shouldn't check for cv::Mat::isContinuous here, the gaps are from one row to another, you are taking pointers to a single row, so you don't need to deal with the matrix gaps.