P I Ps| a General Purpose Parallel Image Processing System ?

In this paper we discuss general requirements for parallel implementations of image processing algorithms. Of special importance are the communication demands in the parallel system which are determined by the algorithm under consideration. These communication demands are decisive for determining the best way to distribute the image data to the network processors. Analysing these factors for some typical image processing algorithms reveals that it is diicult to nd a xed network structure which meets all the demands equally well. A possibility to cope with these problems is to embed diierent topologies into a xed network structure. The mentioned factors were guidelines for the design of the general purpose Parallel Image Processing System P i ps. We describe the structure of this software package and elucidate for some selected topics the implementation details. Experimental results from an implementation on a multiprocessor system are presented.