VLSI architectures for real-time image processing

Abstract

Image processing has left the labs for the field. Computer vision has gone through feasibility demonstration in a number of applications - visual inspection,automatic assembly and robotics and is ready for real-time cost effective implementations. This is especially true of military applications, in real-time scene analysis for the detection, recognition and tracking of targets in video from real-time (TV-like) sensors. Real-time implementation provides an exceptional challenge because of the extremely high data rates (in excess of 20 MHz), which result in computational throughputs of several thousand mega operations per second (MOPS). Even harder to realize are the requirements of low cost and size of the hardware integrated with the sensors.