Pyramidal Systems for Computer Vision

This volume gathers the papers from a NATO Advanced Research Workshop held in Maratea, Italy, from 5 to 9 May 1986. The meeting focused on pyramidal systems for image processing and computer vision. Forty attendees from eleven countries took an active part, and the workshop brought together the heads of every research group that had built a prototype pyramid machine or drafted a design for one.

The book presents pyramidal multiprocessing as a young branch of parallel architecture for image processing. In these systems, processors sit in stacked planes running from a base up to an apex. Each plane is typically a reduced copy of the plane beneath it, shrunk by a power of two. Processors connect side to side within their own plane, and vertically to a "parent" processor above and "children" below. The contributors examined the properties of this design, including versions built as cellular arrays and as hypercubes.

The proceedings report on projects from several parts of the world and describe applications in computer vision, tactile systems and numerical calculation. It will mainly interest researchers and engineers working on computer architecture and image analysis.