Hive: A distributed system for vision processing

We have built a novel vision processing system architecture called Hive. Hive fills a gap in the vision middleware by providing mechanisms for simple setup and configuration of distributed vision computation. Hive facilitates communication between independent cross-platform modules via an extensible protocol, allowing these distributed modules to form a vision processing pipeline. A plug-in interface allows general software to be represented as Hive modules: e.g. drivers for hardware devices such as cameras or implementations of particular vision algorithms. The modules are set up as a peer-to-peer network which allows for automated data transfer, callbacks and synchronization. We describe the architecture, communication protocol, plug-in interface and control system for the modules. A distributed face tracking system demonstrates the simplicity and flexibility for creating complex distributed vision applications using Hive.