Quantum-dot cellular automata design for median filtering and mathematical morphology operations on binary images

Abstract

The continuing development of smaller electronic devices into the nanometer regime offers great possibilities of highly parallel computing systems, as it allows to reduce power consumption and device sizes and to increase operating speed. Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) has been proposed as an alternative for nanoelectronic devices and introduces a new opportunity for the design of highly parallel algorithms and architectures. Its benefits are the fast speed, very small size, high density and low energy consumption. These advantages can be very useful for various real time image processing applications. Complex image processing algorithms include in many cases the well-known binary median filter and mathematical morphology operations such as dilation and erosion. In this paper we propose and simulate two innovative QCA circuits which implement the dilation and the erosion. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.