Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!newstop!sun!pepper!cmcmanis
From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga and Image Processing: take 2
Message-ID: <120820@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 10 Aug 89 23:08:14 GMT
References: <3043@deimos.cis.ksu.edu>
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Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
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Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
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I wrote an article for BYTE about using the Amiga as an inexpensive
Image Processing workstation back in March of '88. The response from
the article was mostly "How do I do this on my IBM PC compatible?"
although there were some other good letters, one from a guy in Australia
whose Masters thesis involved using a similar setup (Digiview + A1000)
to look at tooth brushes and reject those that were missing bristles. 
The biggest bottleneck was the CPU itself. To run a serious convolution
over a 16 level grey scale image could take you 2 - 3 *hours*. Of course
with an FPU and/or a 32 bit processor you could speed that up considerably.
Some people were even doing fairly wild assembly level stuff that did
all fixed point math. Some really cool stuff is/was going on at ULowell
with Rich Miner. Basically they had built a really whizzy pipelined 
Image Processing board that could do Sobels in < 1/30th of a second. 
(Took about 30mins to do one with a stock 68000). So the conclusion is
that it is a great box for learning about image processing 'cuz you
can get it inexpensively and you can run all of the classic as well as
you own algorithims on it for doing research. What it isn't good at is
production environments where you need to do things *fast* in which 
case you need to throw a little bit more money at the problem and 
get an '020 or one of Rich's boards. 


--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.
"A most excellent barbarian ... Genghis Kahn!"