Parallel Tools for Colored Image Processing

Over recent years clusters of workstations have begun to replace systems of mainframes. These workstations can be used to behave as a parallel machine, and then could supply supercomputing performance at modest cost. We report an experiment of such a network within PVM framework for an industrial image analysis application. The goal of the application is to build an automated process of textile color pattern analysis. We plan to build several tools for parallel image analysis, and among those tools, we present here first the parallelization of a quantization algorithm and a way to parallelize a color image pyramid using the Parallel Virtual Machine environment. One important point is the use of the distributed storage that represents a set of workstations. This distribution allows the complete parallelization of the Read/Write operations.