AN ARCHITECTURAL STUDY, DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF DIGITAL IMAGE ACQUISITION, PROCESSING AND DISPLAY SYSTEMS WITH MICROPROCESSOR-BASED PERSONAL COMPUTERS AND CHARGE-COUPLED DEVICE IMAGING TECHNOLOGY

This dissertation presents a study of the architectures, in addition to the actual development and application of digital image processing systems, within the personal-computer (PC) environment. These PC-vision systems provide a new class of cost-effective tools for a broad range of applications.;Another system, the PC-color system, was developed for greater application flexibility. The system accepts input from any standard camera (either NTSC or RGB color cameras) and digitally processes the images for subsequent display on the PC's graphics monitor. Development of a new dithering algorithm provides this realistic color image synthesis on binary-RGB display systems. Another feature of the system is that the hardware and software developed can support numerous types of host PCs (both TI and IBM). Artificial intelligence and business applications typify applications of this system.;The design of the Enhanced PC-vision system presents the first step toward the future of this class of vision systems. Recent IC developments will enable the improvement of image processing capabilities and, resultantly, expand the scope of possible applications.;The advantages of electronic-image sensing are stressed with the first system, the TIPC-CCD camera system, which uses a Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) imager. Both new and conventional digital image processing techniques are used to enhance the image acquisition capabilities of this vision system. Application of the system to solve several imaging tasks illustrates the achieved performance.