Real-Time Video Signal Processing System For Dynamic Images

摘要

A real-time video signal processing system (Picot-system) has been developed which processes multiple color time-varying images at video-rate and carries out various image processing functions such as edge detection, and geometrical transformation. The system is a multi-processor system including several hundred processors, and is divided into cascaded clusters, each of which has 16 processors. Each processor has an image memory to store all data required for its own processing, thus eliminating memory-access conflict. These processors and cluster inputs/outputs are connected by a crossbar network, which carries out all combinations of connections, and processors operate in both parallel and pipeline fashion. Micro-program controlled system has a control mechanism and arithmetic functions suitable for image signal processing. Performance of the system improves in proportion to the number of processors. The processors and network are virtually all LSIs, which use CMOS gate-array technology. The Picot-system can be applied to various fields such as medical imaging, robot vision, video CODEC, broadcast video production, and so on.