Machine Vision, 3rd Edition

Real-Time Hardware and Systems Design Considerations

In general, vision involves huge amounts of computation, as images are two-dimensional and in real-time applications are liable to be delivered at rates of 10 to 20 per second. Although humans can easily cope with these data rates, they are often beyond the processing capabilities of conventional computers. This chapter explores the situation and demonstrates how, using special computational hardware, the processing problems can be addressed and alleviated.

Look out for:

• how parallel processing can radically improve the speeds at which vision algorithms run.

• the concept of an SIMD (single instruction stream, multiple data stream) computer, with one processor per pixel in a 2-D array. ...