Distributed processing of a digital image

A computer program product for processing a digital image in a distributed computing environment, the distributed computing environment comprising a communications network interconnecting two or more computing nodes, the computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith, the program instructions executable by a processor to cause the processor to:

• receive the digital image;
• determine a segmentation of the digital image into two or more image segments;
• for each of the image segments, determine a number of non-background pixels comprised by the image segment;
• determine an assignment of each of the image segments to one of the computing nodes, the determination of the assignment comprising balancing, based on the number of non-background pixels determined for each of the image segments, the workload of the assigned computing nodes responsive to processing the image segments;
• generate a segment list, each of the image segments being represented by an entry of the segment list, the entries being sorted by the number of non-background pixels of the represented image segment, the balancing of the workload being performed according to a workload-balancing assignment scheme applied to the sorted segment list, the workload-balancing assignment scheme comprising at least one of the following:
• a round-robin assignment;
• a round-robin assignment with reversal;
• and a pairwise assignment of a leading entry of the sorted segment list with a trailing entry of the sorted segment list;
• and
• cause each of the assigned computing nodes to process the image segments assigned to the computing node.

A computer system, comprising a processor, a memory and a communication interface to a distributed computing environment, the distributed computing environment comprising a communications network interconnecting the communication interface and two or more computing nodes, the memory carrying computer executable code for execution by the processor, wherein execution of the instructions causes the processor to perform a method for processing a digital image in the distributed computing environment, the method comprising:

• receiving the digital image;
• determining a segmentation of the digital image into two or more image segments;
• for each of the image segments, determine a number of non-background pixels comprised by the image segment;
• determining an assignment of each of the image segments to one of the computing nodes, the determination of the assignment comprising balancing, based on the number of non-background pixels determined for each of the image segments, the workload of the assigned computing nodes responsive to processing the image segments;
• generating a segment list, each of the image segments being represented by an entry of the segment list, the entries being sorted by the number of non-background pixels of the represented image segment, the balancing of the workload being performed according to a workload-balancing assignment scheme applied to the sorted segment list, the workload-balancing assignment scheme comprising at least one of the following:
• a round-robin assignment;
• a round-robin assignment with reversal;
• and a pairwise assignment of a leading entry of the sorted segment list with a trailing entry of the sorted segment list;
• and
• causing each of the assigned computing nodes to process the image segments assigned to the computing node.