Parallel implementation of morphological processing on Cell/BE with OpenCV interface

Abstract

One of the most frequently used operations in image recognition is morphological processing. In this paper, we propose a parallel implementation of morphological processing optimized for Cell Broadband Engine (Cell), which is one of the latest high performance embedded processors. By utilizing the computational power of Cell suitable for image recognition, we achieve high-speed morphological processing. Moreover, we construct a software interface to the parallel implemented morphological operations on Cell compatible with OpenCV library. By our implementation, two 3.6 GHz SPEs on Cell can process erosion of a 1024×768 pixel image by a 5×5 pixel rectangle kernel in 0.601 milliseconds, though a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 processor takes 11.590 milliseconds to process it.