🚀 go-pugleaf

I have an interest in digitising stereoscopic video images for use in
human movement studies (e.g. limb movement dynamics) and, unrelatedly
at present, neural networks for various modelling tasks.  From the
data and experience to hand it seems that transputers offer the power
and expansion prospects which will be required (especially in the
neural nets).  Accordingly I have budgeted for something like the
Transtech TTG-F frame grabber and a 10-TRAM host card for my baseline
environment (networked PCs).  The frame grabber takes up 4 TRAM slots,
so I expect to have a reasonable expansion path before having to get
more host cards.  I'm experienced in C, so have opted for this as the
lingua-franca in the form of 3L's Parallel C.

On the video (movement) side, I'd be interested in deltas (subtracting
successive frames, effectively), with concentration on maybe 6% of the
full scanned area.  Any comments from anyone who's done/doing/given-up-
on something along these lines ??  Granted, it's not the sort of soft-
ware you'd knock up haphazardly before morning tea break one day, but
according to one of our ex Prime Minister's, "Life wasn't meant to be
easy!".  BTW, I don't need display of real-time (or indeed ANY) video,
just a bunch of numbers saying "this point moved xx,yy,zz units since
the last capture time".  Using multiplexed video sources into 1 grabber
and CCIR TV specs, this means a timing resolution of 40 millisecs, more
than fast enough for what I have in mind.

Another way of going would be a workstation (SUN, DEC, etc) with a
frame grabber card.  There'd most likely be heaps of nearly-written
code out there, but the comparative "isolation" of the processing horse-
power from the grabber hardware weighs up in favour of the txputers, I
think.  Also I have a desire to implement the n/nets (later on) in a
parallel environment.

Comments, etc appreciated.
Cheers,
Denis