Global operations in SIMD cellular processor arrays employing functional asynchronism

We present a new approach to execution of global image processing operations on massively parallel cellular processor arrays. Combining conventional synchronous processing with simple asynchronous propagations we achieve performance increase on global operations without additional hardware cost. By the example of watershed transformation we demonstrate the benefits of mixed synchronous/asynchronous approach. In addition, we investigate asynchronous grey-scale data processing and its applications in image processing.