A 53-GOPS programmable vision processor for processing, coding-decoding and synthesizing of images

TL;DR: It is the set of 205 application-specific instructions and its computing and memory architecture that make the vision processor a generic one.

Abstract: whereas virtual round-table conferencing needs at the sender’s side to find a person’s head, cut it from the background, code it and at the receiver’s side to decode and insert it at the round-table by means of geometric transformations (figure below shows virtual round table) Hence, a vision processor has to support image processing, coding/decoding and 3D graphics Accordingly, a representative body of algorithms from these 3 vision fields was analysed with respect to computational power, elementary instructions and data types needed It was found that scalar, vector and matrix constitute the main data types, and a set of 205 visionbased instructions for vector and matrix types was defined Architectural studies led to a parallel array of 16 processing elements (PE) executing the vision instructions on vector and matrix data, as well as to special cache architectures adapted to the new data types For decoding of instructions, a set of controllers had to be introduced that would deliver control bits to the amount of what full-fledged general-purpose processors use to generate, but at a decade lower power level Finally, starting off from the OAK DSP and its Ccompiler, a programming model extending C by some vision based semantics, but keeping the C syntax was thought to be adequate for the user It is the set of 205 application-specific instructions and its computing and memory architecture that make the vision processor a generic one (see [1] for recent alternatives) In the following, only the functional highlights are reported