Construction of a Parallel Vision System that Satisfies High Speed, Versatility and Scalability

本研究的目的是实现这样一种新型的并行视觉系统，满足高速、通用性和可扩展性的要求。按照惯例，这些要求是彼此不相容的。作者通过使用专门用于视觉处理的硬件来增强Beowulf级PC集群，从而克服了不兼容的问题。其核心思想是引入了视频总线。该系统不仅引入了用于处理器间通信的链路，例如以太网，而且还引入了用于视频数据传输的链路(视频总线)。由于有了视频总线，输入的视频图像被同时馈送到集群的每个元素PC，而不会浪费任何时间复制输入图像。此功能可保证连续的高速(视频率)处理。Beowulf类PC集群的通用性和可扩展性是由商用硬件组成的。在三年研究计划的第一阶段，作者基于上述思想实现了一个原型系统。然后在样机上实现了一个随机访问的运动录像机--虚拟录像带(VVT)。VVT以基于存储器和纯软件的方式实现。在研究计划的最后阶段，我们使用原型和VVT开发了一些应用程序，并进行了一些实验，以验证所提出的想法的可行性和有效性。这些实验的主题是人脸检测、人脸识别、自适应(或环境可调)判别分析等。实验结果支持了该思想的可能性、可行性和有效性。

Aim of this research is to realize such a novel parallel vision system that satisfies requirements of high speed, versatility, and scalability. Conventionally these requirements are incompatible each other. The authors have overcome the problem of incompatibility by augmenting Beowulf-class PC cluster with dedicated hardware for visual processing. Key idea is introduction of video bus. Not only a link for inter-processor communication, such as ethernet, but also a link for video data transfer(video bus)is introduced to the system. Because of the video bus, input video image is fed to each element PC of the cluster simultaneously without any time-wasting duplication of the input image. This feature guarantees continuous and high speed(video rate)processing. Versatility and scalability are obtained by the nature of Beowulf class PC cluster which consists of commodity hardware.At the first stage of the three years research plan the authors have implemented a prototype system that is based upon the proposed idea described above. Then we have implemented a random accessible motion video recorder, named Virtual Video Tape(VVT), on the prototype. VVT is realized as memory based and software only. At the last stage of the research plan, we have developed some application programs using the prototype and VVT, and conducted some experiments to confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed idea. Topics of those experiments are face detection, face identification, adaptive(or environmentally tunable)discriminant analysis, and so forth. Experimental results support t possibility, feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed idea.