A Parallel Transputer System with Fast Pipeline Interconnection

Transputers are processors which are well suited for the parallel implementation of medium and high-level image processing algorithms. The serial data Links may well be used for data interchange within the image processing task. They form, however, a bottleneck with respect to loading and unloading of mass data with video data rates. During the last years a parallel Transputer system was developed and implemented at the University of Technology in Hamburg-Harburg. Besides the processing power the very important aspect of communication power and topology was considered when designing the architecture of the system. As a result the system has three diierent communication structures: one for algorithmic data exchange, one for loading and unloading of mass data like images and one for system communication of the distributed operating software. After an introduction and some architectural assumptions this paper introduces this system including its communication structures and presents the implementation of a fast algorithm for the estimation of motion parameters in image sequences.