An agent-based implementation of irregular pyramid for distributed image segmentation

We propose a solution to handle two problems inducted by the growth of the complexity of machine vision systems: (1) the need of a robust, open and flexible framework to control various descriptive and operational knowledge; and (2) the necessity to have an architecture which offer parallel processing that can be easily scaled to an evolving underlying hardware. We propose an agent society, implemented in the Java language, that is organized as an irregular pyramid for many reasons: (1) an agent provides an abstraction to encapsulate reactive or cognitive processing; and (2) the pyramid proposes a formal graph-based approach to ensure global and distributed goal satisfaction. The evaluation of the architecture performed on a X-scanner breast image, shows good quality results and parallel processing abilities.