Image Understanding Robust Picture Processing Operators and Their Implementation as Circuits

The increasing use of s atellites in image acquisition has made real-time data compression and summary essential. To reduce bandwidth and alleviate the load on land-based computers it is desirable to perform as much picture processing as possible via LSI circuitry aboard the satellite. Such circuits must be able to deal with a wide variety of images and must exhibit a high degree of reliability. In this paper we use some results from the theory of selection networks to produce a family of robust image smoothing operators suitable for LSI implementation. The circuits are (1) decomposable into small functional units, (2) easily testable, and (3) statistically insensitive to spikes or noise in the data.