On the computation and use of projections of digital images in general purpose image processing pipeline architectures

This paper deals with the problem of computing, projections of digital images. The novelty of our contribution is that we present algorithms which are suitable for implementation in general purpose image processing and image analysis pipeline architectures. Also, we propose some new pipeline configurations which achieve a remarkable degree of parallelism in the computation of projection data and in fact, of many other geometrical descriptors of digital images. In particular, random access memories and other dedicated hardware devices are not needed in our algorithms. The effectiveness of our approach and feasibility of the proposed architectures are demonstrated by running our algorithms in commercially available short-pipelines for image processing and analysis. Examples are shown of the use of projection data for machine vision applications.