Image Processing in a Tree of Peano Coded Images

We investigate some attractive features of the 1-D sequence of pixels produced by the peano traversal of an image. We introduce two new hardware operations called bit-spreaded-meshing and its inverse bit-collation to produce and invert the sequence in real-time. A compact binary tree built using this sequence at its base implicitly contains the well known quadtree of the image also. The binary tree representation supports eecient design and implementation of divide and conquer algorithms. Its construction is readily extend-able to higher dimensional images. We present a global optimization algorithm for image segmentation whose design is based on the binary tree. It produces a minimal cutset of homogeneous nodes in the tree using a dynamic programming technique. The experimental results assert the merit of the binary tree based implementation compared to its counterpart the quadtree.