Generality-a low cost approach to digital image processing

The growing market for multimedia and computer vision applications has generated a great deal of commercial interest in video signal processing solutions. Current approaches use dedicated ASICs or large arrays of high performance DSPs such as the TMS320C40. The authors propose a video signal processor, VSP, targetted to accelerate primitive operations commonly encountered in image processing. Recent devices have been implemented which are extensions of DSP architectures or heavily optimised for image coding. The authors target to a broader range of functionality and emphasise performance through parallelism rather than clock speed. This naturally leads to low power devices suitable for portable applications where the authors anticipate the largest application base will be. A general purpose device can dramatically reduce system hardware development costs and enables rapid prototyping, resulting in lower cost products at all the highest volumes. The move from DSP to VSP places considerably greater demands on a silicon architecture-computational requirements are frequently measured in GOPS rather than MOPS. This paper outlines preliminary work carried out in developing a very high performance general-purpose VSP capable of performing a wide range of algorithms