Patent US 4,192,004

A topological transformation system for transforming and extracting data from distributed images in n-dimensional spaces. The system is disclosed in two-dimensional form as principally comprising an iterative array of logical cells, each of which may be used to contain duplicates of each element of the distributed image. The duplicates are translatable with respect to each other simultaneously in all possible directions, and comparisons may be made at each translational step between the current image and previous or transformed versions of the image. An example is described for deriving the center points of holes in a two-dimensional image, and a four-dimensional iterative array is also disclosed.