An architecture for high-performance 2-D image display

Image processing operations can be divided into two classes, those pre-processing operations that are market- and application-specific and those widely-used operations that are useful in any application that requires the display of 2-D images. In the interest of achieving real-time rates for the broader class of 2-D image display operations, Hewlett-Packard has developed a hardware accelerator called VISUALIZE-IVX. It is capable of scaling, rotating, mirroring, translating and filtering 1K-by-1K output images at greater than 30 frames/s while simultaneously enhancing image brightness and contrast. This paper describes the pipelined architecture used to achieve this performance on a desktop computer. The architecture makes use of a hybrid mapping scheme for geometric transformations. Also a unique memory device was designed that minimizes local image buffers while eliminating the need to resend pixels from main memory. A recently developed method of extending the filtering capabilities, that may be incorporated into future products, is also presented. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.