Parallel implementation of morphological processing by arbitrary kernels on Cell/BE with OpenCV interface

One of the most frequently used operations in image recognition is morphological processing. In this paper, we propose a parallel implementation of morphological processing optimized for Cell Broadband Engine (Cell), which is one of the latest high performance embedded processors. By utilizing the computational power of Cell suitable for image recognition, we achieve high-speed morphological processing. Moreover, we construct a software interface to the parallel implemented morphological operations on Cell compatible with OpenCV library. By our implementation, six 3.6 GHz SPEs on Cell can process erosion of a 640times480 pixel image by a 5times5 pixel elliptic kernel in 0.263 milliseconds, though a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 processor takes 0.547 milliseconds to process it under Intel Integrated Performance Primitives.