PRISM: a visual programming system for pipelined image processors

Pipelined image processing hardware has become increasingly popular because it makes it possible to build real-time machine vision systems at reasonable cost. Unfortunately, this type of hardware is often difficult to program, and the difficulty increases rapidly as the machines become more flexible and powerful. In this paper we present PRISM, a visual programming language that supports rapid prototyping and algorithm development on pipelined image processors. Computations are represented by graphs whose nodes are data transformations and whose arcs are data paths. The system allows the user to build and edit graphs and attach attributes to graph nodes specifying details of the computation (gains, masks, et cetera). Once the graph is adequately connected, the system traverses the graph, analyzes the data dependencies, and constructs an execution schedule. It then repeatedly executes the schedule, mapping graph nodes to specific hardware resources as needed. We discuss the overall architecture of the system, describe the class of hardware devices to which it is applicable, and then present an implementation for the Datacube MV 20. We analyze the implementation in terms of how well it makes use of the underlying hardware, and discuss ways of improving its efficiency.© (1992) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.