Let’s optimize! Running 15× faster with a situation-specific algorithm
Let’s speed up some software! Our motivation: we have an image, a photo
of some text from a book. We want to turn it into a 1-bit image, with
just black and white, extracting the text so we can easily read it.
We’ll use an example image from
scikit-image, an excellent image processing
library:
from skimage.data import page
import numpy as np
IMAGE = page()
assert IMAGE.dtype == np.uint8
Here’s what it looks like (it’s licensed under this
license):
The task we’re trying to do—turning darker