New mediaprocessor and its image computing library

Abstract

High-performance mediaprocessors that aim at high-level language programming without sacrificing much would be very desirable in many applications including medical imaging. Media Accelerated Processor (MAP) 1000 that is jointly being developed by Hitachi, Ltd. and Equator Technologies, Inc. is one of such next-generation mediaprocessors. We present the two main issues in programming these mediaprocessors, i.e., using C intrinsics (hinting to the compiler a desired assembly language instruction in a C program so that the compiler tries to use the hinted instruction in the compiled code) and data flow control, which still requires a high degree of expertise in the detailed architectural features including many low-level instructions, handling input/output data transfers, and in-depth understanding of the algorithm. To ease the programming burden and allow flexible and efficient deployment of the MAP-based target systems, we have developed the MAP University of Washington Image Computing Library (UWICL) for the MAP1000. Currently, it consists of 105 functions. The UWICL functions effectively decouple the data flow control and data processing in a flexible two-layered software structure, where the upper layer is responsible for the data transfer between on-chip cache and off-chip memory by utilizing the on-chip DMA controller in a double-buffering scheme and the lower layer performs the data processing. This hierarchy allows the flexibility to use the UWICL modules depending on how the application is implemented and/or the level of user's experience in programming the MAP1000 mediaprocessor.

<title>Spatial exemplars and metrics for characterizing image compression transform error</title>

“…The continued development of large-format, high-resolution image detectors and displays has produced a supralinearly increasing data burden [1]. The use of multi-, hyper-, and ultra-spectral sensors tends to exacerbate this situation by increasing the number of band images available at improved spatial resolution [2] The growing popularity of consumer applications such as digital still and video cameras, Internet video, and the emerging exchange of digital movies over the Internet further increases the amount of imagery that is stored, transmitted along limited-bandwidth communications channels, or processed computationally.…”