Computer vision on the MGAP
Robert Michael Owens, M.J. Irwin, Chetana Nagendra, R.S. Bajwa · 2002
The authors show that the MGAP can be used to solve a variety of problems in computer vision. It provides performance similar to the MPP, the CLIP, the DAP and the GAPP at a fraction of their cost. At the same time, the MGAP is general purpose enough to be used in a variety of other fields also. As might be expected, the MGAP is very well suited for low-level vision tasks, but is not ideal for tasks requiring global information, such as histogramming. A shift-register network is proposed as an addition to the array architecture to improve global communications. This results in a factor of 20 performance improvement for histogram computation. The MGAP prototype is currently being tested. The custom micro-grain PGAs and the board have been fabricated. The authors have a simulator for the processor array which operates at the level of the assembly code. They have developed both high and low level programming tools. A new language called /sup */C++ is used to program the MGAP. It extends C++ to handle parallel data and specify data movement in a concise and natural manner. The compiler generates code for the processor array, the controller as well as the scalar processor.