Build OpenCV from source with CUDA support

GPU Module Introduction

 General Information

The OpenCV GPU module is a set of classes and functions to utilize GPU computational capabilities. It is implemented using NVIDIA* CUDA* Runtime API and supports only NVIDIA GPUs. The OpenCV GPU module includes utility functions, low-level vision primitives, and high-level algorithms. The utility functions and low-level primitives provide a powerful infrastructure for developing fast vision algorithms taking advantage of GPU whereas the high-level functionality includes some state-of-the-art algorithms (such as stereo correspondence, face and people detectors, and others) ready to be used by the application developers.

The GPU module is designed as a host-level API. This means that if you have pre-compiled OpenCV GPU binaries, you are not required to have the CUDA Toolkit installed or write any extra code to make use of the GPU.

The OpenCV GPU module is designed for ease of use and does not require any knowledge of CUDA. Though, such a knowledge will certainly be useful to handle non-trivial cases or achieve the highest performance. It is helpful to understand the cost of various operations, what the GPU does, what the preferred data formats are, and so on. The GPU module is an effective instrument for quick implementation of GPU-accelerated computer vision algorithms. However, if your algorithm involves many simple operations, then, for the best possible performance, you may still need to write your own kernels to avoid extra write and read operations on the intermediate results.

To enable CUDA support, configure OpenCV using