Vista for a general purpose computer vision system

An integrated vision triarchitecture, Vista, for a general-purpose computer vision system is described. Vista consists of three parallel architectures. A fine-grained mesh-connected single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) architecture is proposed to minimize the communication overhead between processing elements in existing mesh-connected architectures. A medium-grained multiple-instruction multiple-data (MIMD) architecture is proposed to alleviate the communication overhead in loosely coupled multiprocessors and the memory contention in tightly coupled multiprocessors. A coarse-grained MIMD architecture is proposed to reduce the communication and input/output (I/O) overheads in existing hypercube multiprocessors. These architectures are exploited for low-, intermediate-, and high-level computer vision, respectively. Each architecture shows a performance improvement in each class. The three architectures are pipelined into Vista for a general-purpose computer vision system.<<ETX>>