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The design and implementation of a distributed image understanding system

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Journal of Systems Integration

Abstract

Computer vision is concerned with extracting information about a scene by analyzing images of that scene. Performing any computer vision task requires an enormous amount of computation. Exploiting parallelism appears to be a promising way to improve the performance of computer vision systems. Past work in this area has focused on applying parallel processing techniques to image-operator level parallelism. In this article, we discuss the parallelism of computer vision in the control level and present a distributed image understanding system (DIUS).

In DIUS, control-level parallelism is exploited by a dynamic scheduler. Furthermore, two levels of rules are used in the control mechanism. Meta-rules are concerned mainly with which strategy should be driven and the execution sequence of the system; control rules determine which task needs to be done next. A prototype system has been implemented within a parallel programming environment, Strand, which provides various virtual architectures mapping to either a shared-memory machine, Sequent, or to the Sun network.

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Hwang, SY., Wang, TP. The design and implementation of a distributed image understanding system. Journal of Systems Integration 4, 107–125 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01975432

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01975432

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