Describes image rectification, explains why it is necessary, how it is performed and proposes a hardware implementation for realtime operation as well as outlining a number of important additional applications that such a module may support, including ground plane obstacle detection.>

Abstract We describe a working multi‐transputer stereo vision system which exploits various forms of parallelism in a number of visual competences upon a specialized hardware architecture that provides distributed video datapaths to the processor array. We exploit stereo and spatial parallelism to recover 3‐D scene descriptions from passive stereo vision. To recognize and recover the positions of modelled objects, we exploit featural parallelism at both the object and sub‐object level. We also describe a real‐time object‐tracking algorithm that exploits featural parallelism in the concurrent tracking of a set of object features. These competences have been integrated into a general‐purpose architecture and we present some performance results and descriptions of the use of this vision engine in two application domains.