The proposed innovation is real-time hardware for image processing, image understanding, and machine vision that will achieve significant performance increases over current systems by implementing the reduced set of operations required to support aspecific set of algorithms. These algorithms are the "generic neighborhood operations" of Koenderink and van Doorn whichprovide a framework for describing the local structure of objects in images at a point.The goal of Phase I of this project is to perform the technical research and detailed engineering design of a system to implementthis theory of generic neighborhood operators in real-time. This project is concerned with performing the engineering design for real-time hardware for image processing and image understanding.In its final implementation, it will achieve orders of magnitudeperformance increases over currently available systems byimplementing only a reduced set of operations required to supporta specific set of algorithms. In particular, in its final configuration, it may process at up to 138 G operation per second.Commercial Applications:(1) Robotics: vision systems inunconstrained environments; (2) Medical images: mammography, papsmears, chest x-rays; (3) Security: face recognition, fingerprintidentification; (4) Automated inspection: unconstrained objectrecognition; (5) Office automation: OCR, forms recognition; and(6) General computer vision research.