Parallel and Distributed Algorithms for High-Speed Image Processing

摘要

Typical desktop workstations can be a severe bottleneck in the viewing and enhancement of imagery data. Due to the nature of many image processing algorithms, an effective method for alleviating this problem is through parallelism. Parallel hardware can come in many forms, from small clusters of workstations and workstations with many processors to dedicated hardware containing 10's, 100's and 1000's of processing nodes. One of the challenges is developing a portable parallel image processing library in such a potentially diverse environment. These issues led to the development of a Parallel Image Processing Toolkit (PIPT). The toolkit hides the detail of parallelization from the users of the PIPT and provides a uniform programming interface. In developing the toolkit the issues of advanced data handling, load, balancing and parallel visualization were addressed. In addition a specific computationally expensive High Resolution Video Stills algorithm was implemented within the PIPT. The important contributions that resulted from this work transcend the individual tasks that were undertaken. First, the general approach that was taken to implement the PIPT illustrates several important principles for the design and implementation of general purpose parallel libraries. in this regard, the PIPT design can serve as a 'design pattern' for an extensible parallel library. Second, the design pattern of the current implementation of the PIPT contains some notable attempts at programming image processing tasks in a generic fashion.