PDE based histogram modification with embedded morphological processing of the level-sets

Abstract

This paper describes parallel histogram modification techniques with embedded morphological preprocessing methods within the CNN-UM framework. The procedure is formulated in terms of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE) and approximated through finite differences in space, resulting in coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODE). The I/O mapping of the system (containing both local and global couplings) can be calculated by a complex analogic (analog and logic) algorithm executed on a stored program nonlinear array processor, called the cellular nonlinear network universal machine (CNN-UM). We describe and illustrate how implementation of the algorithm results in an adaptive multi-thresholding scheme when histogram modification is combined with embedded morphological processing at a finite (low) number of grayscale levels. This has obvious advantages if the further processing steps are segmentation and/or recognition. Experimental results processing real-life and echocardiography images are measured on different hardware/software platforms, including a 64/spl times/64 CNN-UM chip (ACE4k).