The paper discusses a parallel, multiprocessor implementation of methods based on partial differential equations (PDE). It focuses on the implementation requirements of segmentation by active contours. Here, the key task is the accurate computation of an implicit description of the contours, i.e. the distance map. This paper demonstrates the use of the proposed architecture by giving a hardware implementation of the distance transform based on the parallel Massive Marching algorithm. The extension of the non-linear filtering implementation is also proposed.