A neural-net board system for machine vision applications

The authors describe a board system that integrates an analog neural net chip with a digital signal processor and fast memory. This system is in use as a coprocessor of a workstation where it accelerates computationally-intensive tasks for machine vision. A software environment has been developed to support image processing and testing of the system. The system was used to develop an application where the neural net determines the position and size of characters in complex images. For this task an increase in speed of a factor over 1000 over a workstation was achieved.>