The detection of discontinuities in motion, intensity, color, and depth is a well studied but difficult problem in computer vision. We discuss our 'resistive fuse;' circuit--the first hardware circuit that explicitly implements either analog or binary line processes in a controlled fashion. We have successfully designed and tested an analog CMOS VLSI circuit that contains a 1-D resistive network of fuses implementing piece-wise smooth surface interpolation. The segmentation ability of this

more »

... rk is demonstrated for a noisy step-edge input. We derive the specific current-voltage relationship of the resistive fuse from a number of computational considerations, closely related to the early vision algorithms of Koch, Marroquin and Yuille (1986) and Blake and Zisserman (1987) . We discuss the circuit implementation and the performance of the chip. In the last section, we show that a model of our resistive network--in which the resistive fuses have no internal dynamics--has an associated Lyapunov function, the co-content. The network will thus converge, without oscillations, to a stable solution, even in the presence of arbitrary parasitic capacitances throughout the network.