Hierarchical Frameworks for Early Vision

The serial processing mode was the first mode used in computer vision, as in many other domains. It is due to Von Neumann, although he was even more interested in parallel computing. In this context, a computer basically consists of a memory (whose capacity can now be as high as several gigabytes) containing the data to be processed and the codes for the instructions to be applied to the data; a processor which reads an instruction in the memory and executes the basic computation it describes.