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This paper describes a software architecture that allows image processing researchers to develop parallel applications in a transparent manner. The architecture's main component is an extensive library of data parallel low level image operations capable of running on homogeneous distributed memory MIMD-style multicomputers. Since the library has an application programming interface identical to that of an existing sequential library, all parallelism is completely hidden from the user. The first part of the paper discusses implementation aspects of the parallel library, and shows how sequential as well as parallel operations are implemented on the basis of so-called parallelizable patterns. A library built in this manner is easily maintainable, as extensive code redundancy is avoided. The second part of the paper describes the application of performance models to ensure efficiency of execution on all target platforms …