Parallel programming for computer vision

Two Unix environments developed for programming parallel computers to handle image-processing and vision applications are described. Visx is a portable environment for the development of vision applications that has been used for many years on serial computers in research. Visx was adapted to run on a multiprocessor with modest parallelism by using functional decomposition and standard operating-system capabilities to exploit the parallel hardware. Paragon is a high-level environment for multiprocessor systems that has facilities for both functional decomposition and data partitioning. It provides primitives that will work efficiently on several parallel-processing systems. Paragon´s primitives can be used to build special image-processing operations, allowing one´s own programming environment to be grown naturally.<>