System Design For Local Neighborhood Processing
Patrick F. Leonard, Trevor Mudge · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1985
A class of processors which perform local neighborhood or cellular operations has well-documented applications in image processing. The architectural feature which unites these processors is their use of special-purpose hardware to compute image transformations based both on the values and on the spatial relationship of pixels in the input image. Typical operations include 3 x 3 convolution and mathematical morphology. Processing elements which compute cellular operations have been incorporated in a variety of system architectures. These range from single-processor, recirculating buffer systems to systems which have thousands of processors in a four-way interconnected mesh. Another feature which unites these processors is that they operate on images in the iconic domain. A new class of non-iconic processor is introduced here which uses image encoding schemes to reduce the number of operations required for certain classes of operations by between one and two orders of magnitude.