PDF format.
This paper describes a complete 6-year project starting from its theoretical basis up to the hardware and software system implementation, and to the description of its future evolution. The main goal of the project is to develop a subsystem that operates as a processing unit attached to a standard workstation and in perspective as a low-cost low-sized specialized embedded system devoted to low level image analysis and cellular neural networks emulation. The architecture has been extensively used for basic low level image analysis tasks up to optical flow computation and feature tracking, showing encouraging performances even in the first prototype version.