A TREE MATCHING ALGORITHM AND VLSI ARCHITECTURE FOR REAL-TIME 2D OBJECT CLASSIFICATION

This paper presents a real-time classification algorithm for two-dimen sional (2D) object contours using a tree model which is implemented in a modular very large scale integration (VLSI) architecture. The hardw are implementation takes advantage of pipelining, parallelism, and the speed of VLSI technology to perform real-time object classification. Using the multiresolution tree model, the classification algorithm is invariant under 2D similarity transformations sind recognizes the visi ble portions of occluded objects. The VLSI classification system is im plemented in 0.8 mm CMOS and is capable of performing 34 000 matchings per second. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.