History and Evolution of Single Pass Connected Component Analysis

The techniques for single pass connected component analysis have undergone significant changes from their initial development to current state-of-the-art algorithms. This review traces the evolution of the algorithms, and explores the linkages and development of ideas introduced by various researchers. Three significant developments are: the recycling of labels to enable processing with resources proportional to the image width; reduction of overheads associated with label merging; and processing of multiple pixels in parallel. These are of particular interest to those developing high speed and low latency image processing and machine vision systems.