A quadrilateral-object composer for binary images with reaction-diffusion cellular automata

We will describe a cellular-automaton (CA) LSI that extracts quadrilateral objects, such as box areas filled with the same pixel values, from binary images. We propose an efficient CA algorithm, based on the reaction-diffusion chemical systems model. Each cell in the proposed CA is implemented by a digital circuit called an elemental processor. The CA LSI is constructed by a large number of elemental processors operating in parallel. This parallel operation ensures fast and efficient object extraction when the number of cells (processing pixels) increases. When we assumed a 0.25-/spl mu/m CMOS process with the proposed circuits, the total area of the elemental processor was approximately 5 by 5 /spl mu/m/sup 2/.