TAACTOOL: a high-speed flexible research image processing environment

Abstract

A specialized accelerator board is often added to a workstation to provide a high-speed image processing environment. However, communication between the workstation and accelerator board is frequently so unfriendly that people are reluctant to write their own specialized processing software for research. Instead they rely on inflexible commercial packages. The authors describe a research oriented image processing package for the SUN3 TAAC workstation that illustrates an approach to overcome such an unfriendly workstation/accelerator environment. The package has standard image processing capability such as Fourier transforms, unsharp masking etc, but includes some unique features. Major features of the package are its simplicity of use and its ability to allow the user to customize the processing package to incorporate additional functionality to meet changing day-to-day image processing requirements.