A Sun-Based DSP Workstation for Image Processing

Scientific workstations permit the engineer to acquire, manipulate and display image data. Ideally, the workstation image processing environment should be interactive, which would necessitate a computational accellerator such as a digital signal processing (DSP) peripheral. The talk describes a Sun workstation that incorporates four DSP32 VMEbus signal processing modules, for a total of 50 MFLOPS of computational power. The module has hardware and software support that makes it easy to use as a co-processor from a C-language application program running on the Sun. As an example, the implementation of a subband-DPCM still-frame image decoder will be discussed. Finally, possible architectures for next-generation DSP modules for still and sequence image processing are proposed.