Realising emergent image preprocessing tasks in cellular-automaton-alike massively parallel hardware

摘要

In this paper, we present an emergent computing architecture scheme, denoted as marching pixels (MPs), which is well-suited for massively-parallel embedded systems based realising smart optical sensors. Smart in this context refers to sensors in which signal capturing and signal processing is combined either in one chip or in a compact 3D chip stack. MPs are life-like agents, which are crawling within a pixel field in such a chip in order to find centre points and other attributes of objects in binary images. MPs fulfill these tasks only by utilising local interaction and stigmertic communication. Principal ideas, the architecture and first results are described in this paper along with a comparison to both conventional and other unconventional computing approaches.