Design patterns for multithreaded software pipelines in real time applications

Abstract

This paper presents design patterns that will help in the task of parallelizing graphical real time algorithms, according to the example of a visual real time 3D reconstruction algorithm. These algorithms can often be designed as a dataflow graph, so they can be coarsely granular parallelized in a pipeline pattern. With these patterns, the design process of the parallelization is detached from the design of the graphical algorithm. The advantages and drawbacks of these patterns are discussed with regard to speed, but also to handling and errorproneness and the demanded robustness of real time applications, due to the varying workload of the different steps or data loss or obsoleteness during processing.