Patrick C Coffield, 803851 20Th St, Gainesville, FL 32605

5426785, Jun 20, 1995

Mar 25, 1993

8/037152

Patrick C. Coffield - Shalimar FL

The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Air
Force - Washington DC

G06F 1566
G06F 706

395800

This is a circuit design for determining the order statistics of an arbitrary (length and value) string of numbers as the string is acquired. The circuit is intended for use with a system covered by my copending application titled "A High Performance Architecture for Image Processing", Ser. No. 07/904,315, filed Jun. 25, 1992. This circuit can be connected to each of the fine grain computational cells of that system to provide the desired filtering action (e. g. , median filter). The configuration of the circuit is based upon the notion of a stack operation using comparator circuits as positions in the stack. Each comparator circuit has a counter connected to its output line that indicates a "greater than" condition. A hardware pointer indicates the top position of the stack. Then, as a string value is "pushed" onto the top of the stack, the top value is simultaneously compared to the remaining values in the stack.

5262968, Nov 16, 1993

Jun 25, 1992

7/904315

Patrick C. Coffield - Shalimar FL

The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Air
Force - Washington DC

G06E 300
G06J 300

364604

The logical computer architecture is specifically designed for image processing, and other related computations. The architecture is a data flow concept comprising three tightly coupled components: a spatial configuration processor, a point-wise operation processor, and a accumulation operation processor. The data flow and image processing operations are directed by the control buffer and pipelined to each of the three processing components. The image processing operations are defined by an image algebra capable of describing all common image-to-image transformations. The merit of this architectural design is how elegantly it handles the natural decomposition of algebraic functions into spatially distributed, point-wise operations. The effect of this particular decomposition allows convolution to be computed strictly as a function of the number of elements in the template (mask, filter, etc. ) instead of the number of pixels in the image.