A Portable Image Processing System for Computer Vision

ID
TR-85-09
Authors
William S. Havens
Publishing date
January 1985
Abstract

Computer Vision research is flourishing although its growth has been hindered by the lack of good image processing systems. Existing systems are neither general nor portable despite various attempts at establishing standard image representations and software. Issues of hardware architecture and processing efficiency have frequently dominated system design. Often standard representations are primarily data formats for exchanging data among researchers working at affiliated laboratories using similar equipment. We argue that generality, portability and extensibility are the important criteria for developing image processing systems. The system described here, called PIPS, is based on these principles. An abstract image datatype is defined which is capable of representing a wide variety of imagery. The representation makes few assumptions about the spatial resolution, intensity resolution, or type of information contained in the image. A simple set of primitive operations are defined for direct and sequential access of images. These primitives are based on a bit stream access method that considers files and devices to be a long contiguous stream of bits that can be randomly read and written. Bit streams allow the word boundaries and file system architecture of the host computer system to be completely ignored and require only standard byte-wide direct-access I/O support. The standard image representation has encouraged the development of a library of portable generic image operators. These operators support interactive experimentation and make it easy to combine existing functions into new more complex operations. Finally, graphics device interfaces are defined in order to isolate graphics hardware from image processing algorithms. The system has been implemented under the Unix operating system.