The Cheops Imaging System is a compact, modular platform for acquisition, real-time processing, and display of digital video sequences and model-based representations of moving scenes. It is a laboratory tool and a prototype hardware and software architecture for future programmable video processors. Cheops abstracts out a set of basic, computationally intensive stream operations that may be performed in parallel and embodies them in specialized hardware. In order to simplify programming, a resource management daemon handles the real-time scheduling and allocation.

Cheops was developed as part of the Television of Tomorrow consortium at the MIT Media Lab.

See our publications

Any detailed questions about Cheops - Look at the FAQ. NOTE: This is a internal page only.

• The Isis scripting language
• The State Machine Stream Processor is a project exploring the use of reconfigurable hardware in image processing.
• Chidi: The Flexible Media Processor is a reconfigurable media processing node capable of fast generation and analysis of digital video frames.
• Floe is a operating system for multiprocessing which incorporates the tenets of the Cheops system (hybrid dataflow and specialized processors), and attempts to fix the shortcomings.

Software Environment

Operating System

Resource Manager

System Overview

Processor Module

Output Module

Memory Module

Input Module

HiPPI Module

Hardware Design Tools

The number of MIT students and affiliates that have been involved with Cheops over the years is quite large. This list is not complete, by any means. If you want to add your name/link, send me mail or see the note at the bottom of this page.

Introducing, in alphabetical order, the :

This is a "fix it yourself" page, located at ${CHEOPS_BASE}/WWW/index.html