Image Processing Application Development: From Rapid Prototyping to SW/HW Co-simulation and Automated Code Generation

Nowadays, the market-place offers quite powerful and low cost reconfigurable hardware devices and a wide range of software tools which find application in the image processing field. However, most of the image processing application designs and their latter deployment on specific hardware devices is still carried out quite costly by hand. This paper presents a new approach to image processing application development, which tackles the historic question of how filling the gap existing between rapid throwaway software designs and final software/hardware implementations. A new graphical component-based tool has been implemented which allows to comprehensively develop this kind of applications, from functional and architectural prototyping stages to software/hardware co-simulation and final code generation. Building this tool has been possible thanks to the synergy that arises from the integration of several of the pre-existent software and hardware image processing libraries and tools.COSIVA (TIC 2000-1765-C03-02),EFTCOR (DPI2002-11583-E), PMPDI-UPCT-2004Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería de Telecomunicació

Analysis of reported error in Monte Carlo rendered images

Evaluating image quality in Monte Carlo rendered images is an important aspect of the rendering process as we often need to determine the relative quality between images computed using different algorithms and with varying amounts of computation. The use of a gold-standard, reference image, or ground truth (GT) is a common method to provide a baseline with which to compare experimental results. We show that if not chosen carefully the reference image can skew results leading to significant misreporting of error. We present an analysis of error in Monte Carlo rendered images and discuss practices to avoid or be aware of when designing an experiment