Automatic flow control planning for real-time image processing devices

High performance vision systems have a complex architecture which makes them difficult to program. The objective of the ARVISA (Advanced Real-time VIsion System Architecture) project was to facilitate the programming of such systems by providing an integrated application development environment. Its central component is the automatic flow control planner (FCP). Using the FCP, image processing algorithms can be specified in a device-independent, functional manner. These specifications are then automatically transformed into an executable control program for the desired target device. By examining industrial vision applications, it has been shown that the results of automatic planning by the FCP are comparable to those of manual planning by human experts, but they are created in much less time. The FCP thus offers a significant improvement of efficiency for the programming of real-time vision systems.