Computer and Machine Vision, 4th Edition

Chapter 26

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 arrive at rates of 10–20 per second. Although humans are able to cope easily 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 tackled and alleviated.

Look out for:

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

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