DEVIOUS - A DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENT FOR COMPUTER VISION

Computer vision, owing to the size and complexity of its tasks and its importance to industrial and economic growth, was selected as one of the grand challenge problems by the U.S. Federal High Performance Comp uting Program. Integration of vision operations is identified as a key element of the challenge. A system to integrate computes vision in a distributed environment is presented here. This system, called DeViouS , is based on the client/server model and runs in a heterogeneous envi ronment of Unix workstations. Modern computing environments include la rge numbers of high-powered workstations connected by a very fast netw ork. Many of these computers are idle most of the time. DeViouS takes advantage of this feature of computing environments to distribute the execution of vision tasks. Two primary goals of DeViouS are to provide a practical distributed system and a research environment for vision computing. DeViouS is based on a modular design that allows experiment ation in various aspects of algorithm design, scheduling and network p rogramming. It can make use of any existing computer vision packages w ith very minor changes to DeViouS. DeViouS has been tested in an envir onment of SUN and Digital workstations and has shown substantial impro vements in speed over sequential computing with negligible overhead.