Upper bound for realtime application

Question

I have developped an application for image inpainting. Now I want to claim that it can be used for realtime purposes.

Does somebody know a paper which gives some boundaries for realtime applications? I want to refer to a paper to prove my assumption.

Is there no statement of what runtime a realtime application has to fullfill to be called a realtime application? — DictionaryProver, Jun 10 '14 at 21:53
I don't know whether there is a definition of realtime processing, but there might be special requirements for special tasks. For example, in medical live imaging during endoscopy the image may have no delay of more than x ms to not irritate the doctor during the operation — Micka, Jun 11 '14 at 08:50
See this Stack Overflow question on the differences between concepts like hard real time and soft real time. There is no single definition of what real time means. — Jason R, Jun 12 '14 at 11:46

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 11 '14 at 01:26

Real time means that your algorithm can process the video faster than the time it takes to watch the video. In other words, if you were collecting the video live you would be able to finish processing it as soon as you stopped collecting it with no extra work needed to be done after.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 12 '14 at 04:25

Real time does not have a fixed definition, rather it describes processing speed and is qualified by the image size, frame rate, depth and any other relevant information.

For example, you should may write:

The method can process 640 x 480 grayscale video at 25 fps in real time.

This means that is takes less that 1/25s to process one frame and doesn't slow down video playback.

Upper bound for realtime application

2 Answers2