A custom chip set for real-time image processing

We have designed, fabricated and tested several special purpose chips which perform a range of image processing tasks. All operate in real-time (10 MHz for a 512 × 512 image) and require no external storage. Dedicated architectures along with pipelining and parallelism are extensively utilized to achieve real-time performance. This is in contrast to many image processing systems that require large arrays of general purpose processing chips [1] or non-real-time systems that use a single high speed data-path. To demonstrate the use of the circuits, they are being put into a system designed to recognize two-dimensional images (figure 1) that are characterized by their closed contours.