Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
options by changing the configuration files without recompilation of the visualiza-
tion module.
Calculation modules do not use the graphical interface and do not require user
intervention during calculations. This allows to run them on remote servers, and if
necessary to recompile them for other platforms. Modules are written in C++ and
compiled for PC by the Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 compiler. The total volume of the
executable files is about 1 Mb.
5.2
Image Processing by Belousov-Zhabotinsky Media
5.2.1 What Is Image Processing
In modern research and industrial practice one is often confronted with the fact that
crucial information upon which the solution of a given task is based represents an
image. These are two-dimensional (or sometimes three-dimensional) distributions
of optical characteristics—color, brightness, etc., describing the physical situation
characteristic for the problem under consideration. They can represent slices of
tissue in medicine, cross-sectional views in materials science or geology, the
environment in which an autonomous robot operates, and consequently observed
parts on the assembly line during automated quality control of manufactured
articles. These are only random examples taken from the vast range of situations
characteristic of the modern human activity. For this reason, image processing and
recognition has become today an independent practically important area.
Universal proliferation of digital computers in virtually all areas of modern
activity has naturally resulted in utilization of this technology for image processing.
Nevertheless, high computational complexity of the problems associated with
images and their intrinsic association with human vision motivated the develop-
ment of approaches and tools based on biological principles of information
processing.
Transmission, storage, and processing of information by biological systems are
fundamentally different from the same operations carried out by modern digital
computers. In this case quite complex fragments, and not simple symbols transmit-
ted in a bit-wise fashion, serve as elementary units of information. Those may be the
phonemes in processing of verbal information, images with which vision operates,
etc. Apparently the first attempts to use this fundamental feature of biological
systems were made in the 1950s of the last century. One of the principal efforts
among them was the creation of “cellular logic”—the field of computational
geometry, which is essentially the algebra of binary images defined on the matrices
of binary numbers. Later, in the 1960s Blum proposed the ideology of “wildfire,”
based on the wave principles of simultaneous processing of images as a whole.
