Pascal Ballet, Vincent Rodin and Jacques Tisseau.
Multiagent boundary detection system: A way to parallel image processing.
Parallel and Distributed Methods for Image Processing I.
SPIE's Optical Sciences, Engineering And Instrumentation'97,
volume 3166, pages 316-323, San Diego, CA (USA), 27 July-1 August 1997.
Abstract:
In this article, we would like to detect boundaries of objects with the help
of a multiagent system made up of reactive agents. The reactivity being very
important, the agents' behavior is very simple (perception-action): they have
the capacity, nevertheless, to adapt locally to what they consider their
environment, that is to say the image. An agent can move and has its own
position in its environment. The basic behavior for an agent consists of
following the highest brightness gradient and inscribing its path, if
estimating to be on an edge, in all the agents' shared memory. Its path
thus corresponds to edges which are found in the image. Please note that,
in order to be noise resistant, the path is actually stored in the shared
memory only if it is long enough.
The notion of shared memory is very important because it allows the
interaction among agents and the coordination of their actions. The agents
actually use already found edges for finding new ones or complete those
already detected.
We have tested this system on different gray scale images scenes, but as
well on synthetic scenes allowing analysis of thus obtained results.
The results are promising and especially fast.
Our multiagent system has been tested on a single-processor computer, and
it has been noted that the number of agents in a simulation neither affects
the quality of the result nor CPU time necessary for segmentation of a given
scene. We think that this approach is original in its use of agents and may
be used to implement parallel image processing by assigning, for instance,
an agent to each processor.
[doi:10.1117/12.279629]
[Ballet97c.pdf]