1. A processing system for reconstructing an image having a pattern of intensities, the image being reconstructed from a set of edge location data values defining edges of regions of substantially uniform intensity of the image and a set of edge intensity data values quantifying intensity of the edges, comprising: a memory having a plurality of addressable memory locations, each memory location having stored therein an intensity value for quantifying an intensity of a mapped image location, with each image location having a plurality of neighboring image locations, wherein the memory locations and intensity values are initialized from the set of edge location data values and the set of edge intensity data values; and a reconstruction module coupled to the memory for iteratively updating the intensities of the image locations, for each of a plurality of iterations the reconstruction module addresses a plurality of the memory locations and for each addressed memory location the reconstruction module updates the intensity value at the addressed memory location with a weighted combination of intensity values of neighboring image locations, the updated intensities from a current iteration being stored in the memory as intensity values to be updated during a subsequent iteration such that each iteration produces an incremental directional spreading of intensities from the edges of regions across the image.