PAVA : Parallel Architecture for Vision Applications


In LASMEA-GRAVIR, the research activity "Parallel Architecture for Vision Applications" has been developed between 1990 and 1994.

Abstract
WINDIS ARCHITECTURE has been studied in collaboration with INRIA Sophia-Antipolis (ICARE project). The main characteristics of the parallel architecture are :
  • Active window : position, size and processing are fully real time reprogrammable
  • Digimax or Maxdig : a board which digitalized the analog video flow
  • Active window extraction and low level processing : a low level image processing board called WINDIS is able to process at 20Mhz both convolution (size 3x3, 5x5, ...) and selection of points of interest (threshold, ...)
  • DisBus : is a dedicated bus where results (processed grey levels and list of points of interest) are sent to the DSP area
  • Intermediate level processing : an area of DSP96002 which are able to take in charge in parallel a list of windows of interest. DSP96002 are programming both in assembling lines and C
  • High level processing : results from parallel DSP area are available in a shared memory. A general host CPU collects them in order to implement the high level processing of the vision application: in our case, it consists of visual servoing applications

Synoptic of WINDIS Parallel Architecture (Windis Video)

Photos of WINDIS board, Winproc board and CAPRI module


WINDIS 9000 ARCHITECTURE has been studied around 1994 : it consists to to integrate the low level image processing board WINDIS in order to takes advantage of windowing capabilites of the board. The main characteristics of the parallel architecture are :
  • Active window : position, size and processing are fully real time reprogrammable
  • Digimax or Maxdig : a board which digitalized the analog video flow
  • Active window extraction and low level processing : a low level image processing board called WINDIS is able to process at 20Mhz both convolution (size 3x3, 5x5, ...) and selection of points of interest (threshold, ...)
  • DisBus : is a dedicated bus where results (processed grey levels and list of points of interest) are sent to the DSP area
  • Parallel Dec Alpha processing : an area of T9000-DecAlpha image processing board with high capacity of processor communication through the specific link of the transputer T9000
  • High level processing : results from parallel processing area are available in a shared memory. A general host CPU collects them in order to implement the high level processing of the vision application
Due to integration problems and the evolution of technology, we have abandonned this specific parallel architecture.
People
WINDIS ARCHITECTURE has been studied in collaboration with INRIA Sophia-Antipolis. The list of participating people is :
  • LASMEA
    • Researchers
      none
  • Collaboration
    • INRIA-ICARE
      J.J. Borrelly, P. Rives, INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France
  • Former collaborators
    • Researcher P. Martinet, J. Gallice, J-P. Derutin
    • Master F. Berry (95),
    • CNAM P. Fickinger (92),
Publications
  • Phd thesis and CNAM Report
    • Pascal Fickinger, “Commande référencée vision : Etude et réalisation d'un systeme microélectronique pour l'extraction de primitives vision”, LASMEA, Blaise Pascal University, Clermont-Ferrand, CNAM, Technical report, March 20th, 1992
  • Journal
    • none
  • Book, Book Chapter, Tutorials, Report
    • none
  • Conferences
    • Patrick Rives, Jean-Jacques Borrelly, Jean Gallice, Philippe Martinet, “A Versatile Parallel Architecture for Visual Servoing Applications”, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Computer Architecture for Machine Perception , CAMP'93, pp 400-409, News Orleans, Louisiana, USA, December 15-17th, 1993
    • Philippe Martinet, Patrick Rives, Pascal Fickinger, Jean-Jacques Borrelly,“Parallel Architecture for Visual Servoing Applications”, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Computer Architecture for Machine Perception, CAMP'91, pp 407-418, Paris, France, December 16-18th, 1991