Image processing system with morphological macro cell

An image processing system using morphological macrocells, characterized in that it comprises:

• an image acquisition device for creating a grayscale digital image including a matrix of m lines and n columns coded on b bits, where m, n, and b are integers;
• a set of memories;
• a dynamically reconfigurable computation block for performing image processing, the computation units and the data paths being reconfigurable during execution between individual processes;
• and
• a control system for transferring data between the image acquisition device and the set of memories and for managing the control of p parallel streams of data to the computation block and sending of the data with dedicated addresses as a function of the requirements of the block, where p is an integer;
• in that the computation block includes:
• an integer number k greater than 1 of morphological macrocells each including a set of basic morphological cells organized into b parallel branches (f, g) with an integer number e of stages, each cell performing a basic erosion, dilation or identity function based on the use of linear structuring elements, the functionality of each morphological cell and the size of the structuring elements being programmable dynamically and the parallel streams coming from the basic morphological cells being combined at the output by an arithmetic and logic unit;
• at least one system for parallelizing the data for processing a plurality of lines, respectively a plurality of columns, in parallel, including two buffer modules and a demultiplexer pipelined over a set of s synchronous stages to break down a word into p parallel data streams and connected to the p inputs of the morphological macrocells (MCM1, MCM2, MCM3, MCM4);
• and
• at least one system for reconstructing the image from an integer number z of parallel output streams of the k morphological macrocells, including two buffer modules and a multiplexer pipelined over a set of s′ stages and connected to synchronous outputs of the morphological macrocells;
• and in that the basic morphological cells and the morphological macrocells are provided with a control mechanism able to communicate with the control system to stop selectively execution of processing as a function of the availability of the data and thereafter to resume processing without losing data in the pipeline.