Real-time topological image smoothing on shared memory parallel machines

Abstract

Smoothing filter is the method of choice for image preprocessing and pattern recognition. We present a new concurrent method for smoothing 2D object in binary case. Proposed method provides a parallel computation while preserving the topology by using homotopic transformations. We introduce an adapted parallelization strategy called split, distribute and merge (SDM) strategy which allows efficient parallelization of a large class of topological operators including, mainly, smoothing, skeletonization, and watershed algorithms. To achieve a good speedup, we cared about task scheduling. Distributed work during smoothing process is done by a variable number of threads. Tests on 2D binary image (512*512), using shared memory parallel machine (SMPM) with 8 CPU cores (2 Xeon E5405 running at frequency of 2 GHz), showed an enhancement of 5.2 thus a cadency of 32 images per second is achieved.