A Flexible Runtime System for Image Processing in a Distributed Computational

A runtime system for implementation of image processing operations is presented. It is designed for working in a flexible and distributed environment related to the software architecture of a newly developed UAV system. The software architecture is characterized at a coarse scale as a three level system, with a deliberate layer at the top, a reactive layer in the middle, and a processing layer at the bottom. At a finer scale each of the three levels is decomposed into sets of modules which communicate using CORBA, allowing system development and deployment on the UAV to be made in a highly flexible way. The image processing takes place in a dedicated module located in the process layer, and is the main focus of the paper. This module has been designed as a runtime system for data flow graphs, allowing various processing operations to be created on-line and on demand by the higher levels of the system. The runtime system is implemented in Java, which allows development and deployment to be made on a range of hardware/software configurations. Optimizations for particular hardware platforms has been made using Java's native interface