Computing projections of digital images in 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. No random access of the image memory is necessary. 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. Fast computation of projections of digital images is not only important for extracting geometrical information from images, it also makes possible performing a large number of operations on images in Radon space, thereby reducing two-dimensional problems to a series of one-dimensional problems.