Three-dimensional (3-D) instrumentation using an image sequence is a promising instrumentation method for intelligent systems in which accurate 3-D information is required. However, real-time instrumentation is difficult since much computation time and a large memory bandwidth are required. In this paper, a 3-D instrumentation VLSI processor with a concurrent memory-access scheme is proposed. To reduce the access time, frequently used data are stored in a cache register array and are concurrently transferred to processing elements using simple interconnections to the 8-nearest neighbor registers. Based on a row and column memory access pattern, we propose a diagonally interleaved frame memory by which pixel values of a row and column are stored across memory modules. Based on the concurrent memory-access scheme, a 40 GOPS vprocessor is designed and the delay time for the instrumentation is estimated to be 42 ms for a 256256 images.

This paper describes advances in the study of handwritten Kanji character recognition mainly performed in Japan. The research focus has shifted from the investigation of the possibility of recognition by the stroke structure analysis method to the study of the feasibility of recognition by the feature matching methods. A great number of features and their extraction methods have been proposed according to this approach. On the other hand, studies on pattern matching methods of recognizing Kanji characters using the character pattern itself have been made. The research efforts based on these two approaches have led to the empirical fact that handwritten Kanji character recognition would become more effective by paying greater attention to the feature of directionality. Furthermore, in an effort to achieve recognition with higher precision, active research work has been carried out on pre-processing techniques, such as the forced reshaping of input pattern, the development of more effective features, and nonlinear flexible matching algorithms. In spite of these efforts, the current character recognition techniques represent only a skill of guessing characters" and are still on an insufficient technical level. Subsequent studies on character recognition must address the question of how to understand characters".

A new Elastic-Block Matching Algorithm using bilinear space warping is proposed. In this scheme a convex quadrilateral, which minimizes a distortion measure against the current square block, is searched to compensate the shape deformation caused by a rigid body's 3 dimensional depth motion or rotation. The proposed algorithm gives a remarkable improvement in motion-compensated prediction compared with the conventional algorithm.