The present approach increases bandwidth by performing at least two functions at the pre-processing level. Specifically, under the present approach, program code is structured so that the segmentation and binarization functions/modules (and optionally a blob analysis function/module) are merged into a single module to reduce memory bandwidth. In addition, each image frame is segmented into a plurality of partitions (e.g., vertical strips) to enhance the reusability of the image data in LS already fetched from main memory. Each partition is then processed by a separate one of a plurality of processing engines, thereby increasing the utilization of all processing engines and allowing the processing engines to maintain good bandwidth.