Internet traffic is increasing dramatically, and images comprise a large portion of internet data. Many companies are dealing with huge quantities of images in the data center and performing various image processing tasks. For example, image decoding, resizing, cropping, and encoding are typical tasks that use large numbers of servers. These functions are resource intensive, and CPU performance per core is not keeping pace with demand. The CIP accelerator accelerates PNG, JPEG, WebP, HEIF and Lepton decoding or encoding, as well as image resizing and cropped pixel processing. The CIP accelerator effectively accelerates thumbnail generation and image transcoding, common image processing functions such as sharpening and watermarking, and image analytics.