Modular on-board adaptive imaging

Feature extraction involves the transformation of a raw video image to a more compact representation of the scene in which relevant information about objects of interest is retained. The task of the low-level processor is to extract object outlines and pass the data to the high-level process in a format that facilitates pattern recognition tasks. Due to the immense computational load caused by processing a 256x256 image, even a fast minicomputer requires a few seconds to complete this low-level processing. It is, therefore, necessary to consider hardware implementation of these low-level functions to achieve real-time processing speeds. The considered project had the objective to implement a system in which the continuous feature extraction process is not affected by the dynamic changes in the scene, varying lighting conditions, or object motion relative to the cameras. Due to the high bandwidth (3.5 MHz) and serial nature of the TV data, a pipeline processing scheme was adopted as the overall architecture of this system. Modularity in the system is achieved by designing circuits that are generic within the overall system.