Pipelined Parallelisation of Automatic Face Inspection

A parallel pipeline is shown to be a natural method of speeding up a typical computer vision application, face inspection using `Eigenfaces'. Faces within a stream of video images are continuously surveyed in a manner akin to a `conveyor belt' inspection process. The parallelisation is a new exemplar of a scheme for the rapid prototyping of large-scale, multi-algorithm applications suitable for transfer to a message-passing multicomputer. A general solution, pipelined processor farms (PPF), is preferred to a customised solution. This paper gives details of the software tools and software-engineering methods employed to tackle this class of problem