| This book presents an overview of the guidelines and strategies for transitioning an image or video processing algorithm from a research environment into a real-time constrained environment. Such guidelines and strategies are scattered in the literature of various disciplines including image processing, computer engineering, and software engineering, and thus have not previously appeared in one place. By bringing these strategies into one place, the book is intended to serve the greater community of researchers, practicing engineers, industrial professionals, who are interested in taking an image or video processing algorithm from a research environment to an actual real-time implementation on a resource constrained hardware platform. These strategies consist of algorithm simplifications, hardware architectures, and software methods. Throughout the book, carefully selected representative examples from the literature are presented to illustrate the discussed concepts. After reading the book, the readers are exposed to a wide variety of techniques and tools, which they can then employ for designing a real-time image or video processing system of interest.
The relentless progression of Moore’s Law coupled with the establishment of international standards for digital multimedia has served as the catalyst behind the ubiquitous dissemination of digital information in our everyday lives in the form of digital audio, digital images, and more recently, digital video. Nowadays, entire music libraries can be stored on portable MP3 players, allowing listening to favorite songs wherever one goes. Digital cameras and camera-equipped cell phones are enabling easy capturing, storing, and sharing valuable moments through digital images and video. Set-top boxes are being used to pause, record, and stream live television signal over broadband networks to different locations, while smart camera systems are providing peace of mind through intelligent scene surveillance. Of course, all of these innovative multimedia products would not have materialized without efficient, optimized implementations of practical signal and image processing algorithms on embedded platforms, where constraints are placed not only on system size, cost, and power consumption, but also on the interval of time in which processed information must be made available.While digital audio processing presents its own implementation difficulties, the processing of digital images and video is challenging primarily due to the fact that vast amounts of data must be processed on platforms having limited computational resources, memory, and power consumption. Another challenge is that the algorithms for processing digital images and video are developed and prototyped on desktop PCs or workstations, which are considered to be, in contrast to portable embedded devices, resource unlimited platforms. Adding to this the fact that the vast majority of algorithms developed to process digital images and video are quite computationally intensive, one requires to resort to specialized processors, judicious trade-off decisions to reach an accepted solution, or even abandoning a complex algorithm for a simpler, less computationally complex algorithm. Noting that there are many competing hardware platforms with their own advantages and disadvantages, it is rather difficult to navigate the road from research to reality without some guidelines. Real-Time Image and Video Processing: From Research to Reality is intended to provide such guidelines and help bridge the gap between the theory and the practice of image and video processing by providing a broad overview of proven algorithmic, hardware, software tools and strategies. This book is intended to serve the greater community of researchers, practicing engineers, and industrial professionals who deal with designing image and video processing systems and are asked to satisfy strict system design constraints on performance, cost, and power consumption. |
