Nowadays, it's hard to find a CPU with a single core (even in mobiles). As the tasks are nicely separated, you can do it with a few lines only. So I'd go for it, though the gain is limited.
In case you really mean cross-correlation, then a transform like DFT or DCT could help. They surely do for big images, but with yours 12x16, I'm not sure.
Maybe you mean just a dot product? And maybe you should tell us?
Note that you actually don't need to compute the correlation, most of the time you only need is find out if it's bigger than a threshold:
corr = findCorrelation(extractedCharacter, storedCharacter)
..... more code to check if this is the best match ......
This may lead to some optimizations or not, depending on how the images look like.
Note also that a simple low level optimization can give you nearly a factor of 4 as in this question of mine. Maybe you really should tell us what you're doing?
UPDATE 1
I guess that due to the computation of three products in the loop, there's enough instruction level parallelism, so a manual loop unrolling like in my above question is not necessary.
However, I see that those three products get computed some 100 * 15600
times, while only one of them depends on both extractedCharacter
and storedCharacter
. So you can compute
100 + 15600 + 100 * 15600
dot products instead of
3 * 100 * 15600
This way you may get a factor of three pretty easily.
Or not. After this step there's a single sum computed in the relevant step and the problem linked above applies. And so does its solution (unrolling manually).
Factor 5.2
While byte[]
is nicely compact, the computation involves extending them to ints, which costs some time as my benchmark shows. Converting the byte[]
s to int[]
s before all the correlations gets computed saves time. Even better is to make use of the fact that this conversion for storedCharacters
can be done beforehand.
Manual loop unrolling twice helps but unrolling more doesn't.