The Euler Number and Computer Vision

The world of computing stands at the brink of what may be a revolution, the use of parallel processing to speed up calculations that take too long on a conventional computer. Parallel processing involves many processors working somewhat independently on aspects of a problem, sharing and pooling results from time to time-somewhat the way human organizations work, with individuals working by themselves and occasionally sharing information during committee meetings or by sending messages or writing reports. The purpose of this paper is to show how the computation of the Euler number of a planar region, a useful tool in character recognition, can be carried out with a certain scheme of parallel processing.