Architectures For Parallel Image Processing

Images taken by airborne and laboratory sensors have been used for many purposes including autonomous guidance, robot vision, medical diagnosis, automated inspection and automated measurements. Scene recognition operations are relatively costly in computing time due to the large amount of data needed to be analyzed. To obtain real-time operations, image processing and scene recognition can be done with several microprocessors operating in parallel. Since many of the operations are repetitive in nature, the use of multipro-cessors can greatly enhance the speed of operations. Architectures of several multiprocessor systems capable of performing image processing and scene matchingare described. The design of a new architecture is also described. This system is designed to take advantages of computing capability of a single stream/multi-data stream structure and the architectural simplicity of a pipeline computer.