Programming a Pipelined Image Processor

摘要

Real-time computer vision systems often make use of dedicated image processing hardware to perform the pixel-oriented operations typical of early vision. This type of hardware is notoriously difficult to program, limiting the types of experiments that can be performed and posing a serious obstacle to research progress. This paper describes a pair of programming tools that we have developed to simplify the task of building real-time early vision systems using special-purpose hardware. The system allows users to describe computations in terms of coarse-grained dataflow graphs constructed using an interactive graphical tool. At initialization time it compiles these graphs into efficient executable programs for the underlying hardware. The system has been implemented on a popular commercial pipelined image processor. We describe the computational model that the system supports, the facilities it provides for building real-vision applications, and the algorithms used to generate effective execution schedules for the target machine.