Parallel image processing system-a modular architecture using dedicated image processing modules and a graphics processor

The authors present the dedicated hardware features of an image processing system. The system is based on a modular architecture where all modules are independent of each other. A convolver implementation is given as an example of this approach. The hardware oriented image processing system is designed around a graphics processor. The system consists of a number of processing modules to enhance the performance of typical image processing applications in real-time and uses video RAM and dual-port RAM to enhance the system speed. The proposed design is a real-time image processing system. The novel feature of this architecture is that the algorithm used to generate the output data is programmable and uses separate dedicated image processing modules. These are combined to form a dedicated processing element (PE) which performs a range of tasks, eg, averaging, filtering, edge detection, scaling, point enhancement and thresholding