MACSYM: A hierarchical parallel image processing system for event-driven pattern understanding of documents

MACSYM is a hierarchical parallel processing system for pattern understanding applications. It features event-driven parallel processing for knowledge-based understanding of document images. The system is composed of a master processor, slave processors and a large shared memory, and is equipped with versatile communication facilities. The parallel processing software system M.UM has been developed on MACSYM. It supplies a parallel processing language MacC, an extended version of C, and supports the programming for document image understanding. The Japanese newspaper layout understanding system EXPRESS is being developed on MACSYM. It analyzes a newspaper image and extracts articles in a few seconds.