HART, a heterogeneous architecture for real-time image processing

Today, real-time image processing hardware primarily takes the form of a high speed front end accelerator, targetted toward iconic and intermediate level algorithmic tasks. Examples of contemporary commercial systems are: Datacube, Maxtor and, Data Translation (for PC); Microsystem Mainboard, and Analogic (for VME). These are supported by a range of software environments, such as Visilog or Semper, which permit pre-defined library routines to be executed in a user friendly environment. In some cases, the hardware supports complex operations ranging from morphological operators to stereo vision algorithms. Whilst addressing a required market niche and pushing image processing into real applications, these products are inherently limited by the host machine´s processing power and the interconnection topology adopted within the hardware itself. The authors describe a new architecture which is designed to address these problems and evolve to match the requirements of dynamic scene analysis and understanding