Prospects and problems in designing image oriented information systems

There are slowly maturing and growing about us today a number of techniques which are likely to have a very significant effect upon the implementation of information systems in the near future. One of these techniques is pictorial data handling and interpretation, which is a subclass of the general area called pattern recognition. Pictorial data processing first became volumetrically significant in the case of photographic output of synchrotron bubble chambers which now deliver several million photographs per year. More recently, a surge of interest has developed in automatic interpretation of biological, medical, and weather satellite pictorial data. The automatic scanning of microscopic slides for the purpose of identifying certain morphological characters is an example of a rather complex task in the area of biological/medical laboratory automation. Some new viewpoints have begun to emerge from the experience of grappling with large volume pictorial data handling problems.published or submitted for publicatio

Intensity-based image registration using multiple distributed agents

Image registration is the process of geometrically aligning images taken from different sensors, viewpoints or instances in time. It plays a key role in the detection of defects or anomalies for automated visual inspection. A multiagent distributed blackboard system has been developed for intensity-based image registration. The images are divided into segments and allocated to agents on separate processors, allowing parallel computation of a similarity metric that measures the degree of likeness between reference and sensed images after the application of a transform. The need for a dedicated control module is removed by coordination of agents via the blackboard. Tests show that additional agents increase speed, provided the communication capacity of the blackboard is not saturated. The success of the approach in achieving registration, despite significant misalignment of the original images, is demonstrated in the detection of manufacturing defects on screen-printed plastic bottles and printed circuit boards

A study to analyze six band multispectral images and fabricate a Fourier transform detector

An automatic Fourier transform diffraction pattern sampling system, used to investigate techniques for forestry classification of six band multispectral aerial photography is presented. Photographs and diagrams of the design, development and fabrication of a hybrid optical-digital Fourier transform detector are shown. The detector was designed around a concentric ring fiber optic array. This array was formed from many optical fibers which were sorted into concentric rings about a single fiber. All the fibers in each ring were collected into a bundle and terminated into a single photodetector. An optical/digital interface unit consisting of a high level multiplexer, and an analog-to-digital amplifier was also constructed and is described