Latest developments in image processing for the next generation of devices with a view on DEMO

In magnetic confinement fusion devices the use of cameras, both visible and infrared, has increased very significantly in the last years. The large amount of data (in the range of tens of Gbytes per shot) and the difficulty of the analysis tasks (ambiguity, ill posed problems, etc.), require new solutions. The technology of Cellular Nonlinear Networks (CNNs) has been successfully applied to various tasks, from the real time hot spot detection to the automatic identification of instabilities. The accuracy obtained is comparable to the one of more traditional serial algorithms but the CCNs guarantee deterministic computational times independently from the image contents. Moreover the latest developments have allowed obtaining these results also in the case of space variant image analysis, without compromising the computational speed (of the order of ten thousand frames per second). The method of the optical flow permits to derive information about the speed of the objects moving in the frames of a single camera. The results of previous applications have been so successful that the approach has been extended to videos in compressed format (MPEG) to reduce the computational time to less than 7 ms per frame, preserving the accuracy of the results. Since in the next generation of devices, also the edge will emit Soft X-rays (SXR), new technologies are being developed to perform imaging over this region of the spectrum for a global view of the entire plasma column.