There is a lot happening this week at CES. The awards are already rolling in and the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) had its 2012 Design and Engineering Awards Honorees displayed Sunday night at a CES press event. One of the honorees, in the Software & Mobile Apps category, was Picitup for its computer vision (CV) based driving safety app, iOnRoad . We know these folks pretty well and we were psyched when they downloaded the FastCV™ SDK, quickly incorporated it into iOnRoad and significantly upped the performance.

In a previous post, I provided three reasons why developers should adopt WebGL and discussed the importance of enabling the next generation of use cases for “HTML5-related” 3D graphics within mobile web browsers. The complexity and richness of content on the web continues to increase, and there is a renewed focus from web site and web app developers to utilize the latest functionality--from enabling applications that work in off-line mode, to visually adding complex two and three dimensional graphical elements to enrich their sites.

We love the smarts that come with developers adding computer vision-enabled functionality into their cutting edge applications, but we needed the processing to happen faster. That camera on your mobile phone pulls in a lot of data, so we asked ourselves how we could retain the smarts while still processing the information efficiently so that users get great experiences without bogging down the device. That’s what led Qualcomm to launch FastCV, the first mobile-optimized computer vision (CV) library for ARM-based devices. Qualcomm is making it available to the industry so that CV applications can run efficiently on a wide array of mobile devices, even mass market handsets.