The GRAFIX I image processing system

Abstract

The GRAFIX I system was developed in the late 1960's as a fast flexible system for processing and analyzing filmed images, particularly of material which is essentially binary (black and white), such as printed text, line drawings, certain biomedical images, fingerprints, etc. It incorporates a large scale general purpose time shared computer to provide the facilities for the efficient development of algorithms necessary to perform various image processing and analysis tasks. In addition it contains a fast, high resolution flying-spot film scanner and a powerful and rather general slave processor (the binary image processor, or BIP) which provide data collection and manipulation facilities adequate to perform image processing and analysis tasks at commercially practical speeds. So far it has been successfully employed in a commercial environment to the reading of printed multifont text in complex page formats, and to the reading of Cyrillic, Greek and even handprinted text. At present we are considering future applications beyond the area of optical character recognition, particularly the analysis of engineering drawings, as well as the automatic analysis and classification of fingerprints, the analysis of biomedical images such as chromosomes, the analysis of x-ray images, and the analysis of satellite imagery data, among others.