Line-based Cascade Labeling Algorithm for hyper-scale issue

A fast and efficient algorithm is presented to label the connected components for binary image, especially for very huge images or any image larger than the available memory. The cascading style scheme compresses the algorithm´s workspace to only 2 rows of image, which makes it possible to process any scale image with very low memory requirement. Two techniques are also applied for improving the performance further: the search path compression; the image data prefetching. An extensive comparison with the state-of-art algorithms is proposed, both on random and real datasets. Our algorithm shows an impressive speedup as much as 10X, while the total memory cost is significantly reduced.