Boyer, Kim L. Flynn, Patrick J. The Ohio State University
CISE Research Instrumentation: A High-Performance Computing and Imaging Facility for Research in Image Understanding and Analysis
This research instrumentation enables research projects in: - Perceptual Organization and Image Annotation with Machine Learning - Advanced Object Recognition: Free-Form Objects and Large Modelbases, and - Intelligent Image Compression.
To support the aforementioned projects, this award contributes to the purchase of high performance computing, data acquisition, and display facilities: several Pentiums, switches, disks, backup tape drives, image analysis workstations, scanners, digital video disk, digital cameras, printers, monitors, etc. The research constitutes a cooperative effort of the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Center for Mapping at Ohio State University. The equipment enables studies in image and video understanding and analysis, specifically the research projects cited. Work in computer vision and image analysis is highly computationally intensive, owing to the large datasets and complex algorithms involved. All of this computing activity is sandwiched between the data acquisition (imaging) step and the display or other dissemination of results. The facility will provide a flexible and powerful testbed for the development and implementation of distributed algorithms for image and video understanding, based on Bayesian network formalisms, as well as the acquisition of high-quality digital imagery and video. To this end, the facility incorporates a commodity supercomputer (Beowulf cluster) and image analysis workstations with sufficient storage and network bandwidth to handle the demands of image and video processing datasets and algorithms. Because many of the applications studied involve high resolution aerial imagery, (near) real-time demands, or motion, this capability and flexibility is crucial. To maximize the utility of the installation, many input sources and image storage facilities, such as digital cameras and camcorders, framestores, satellite digital video receiver, and 3D scanner are included.
