JetPack 4.6 (targeted for Q2 2021) will be the last production release to include VisionWorks. After JetPack 4.6.x, JetPack releases will no longer include VisionWorks.
Developers should instead use Vision Programming Interface (VPI), a software library that implements Computer Vision / Image Processing algorithms on the various computing engines available on Jetson, including GPU, CPU, PVA (Programmable Vision Accelerator) and VIC (Video Image Compositor). Unlike OpenCV or Vision works, VPI gives developers the flexibility to choose on which backend to run the VPI algorithms. This enables optimized utilization of Jetson compute capability.
We have been adding support for more computer vision and image processing algorithms with each VPI release, and we plan to add all remaining VisionWorks algorithms of importance by the end of 2021: Dense optical flow, Laplacian Pyramid, Fast Corner extraction and tracking, channel combine/extract, calculating and equalizing histogram of a grayscale image, and primitives like absolute difference, add, bitwise-and, bitwise-not, bitwise-or, bitwise-xor and so on.
VPI is significantly faster than OpenCV and Visionworks. Visit the Performance Comparison section in VPI documentation to learn about the speed ups that VPI algorithms provide over VisionWorks and OpenCV implementations.
Visit the VPI webinar here for a comprehensive introduction to VPI and learn how to build an efficient stereo disparity-estimation pipeline with VPI.