Normal flow measurement visual motion sensor

Abstract

This paper presents a two-dimensional programmable normal optical flow measurement chip implemented in 0.5μm CMOS process. The chip is composed of an array of 120×80 APS pixels. The processing circuitry at the periphery of this array computes partial derivatives with respect to space and time and uses them to calculate the normal flow. The spatial derivatives can be programmed to implement 5×5, 3×3 or 1×3 kernels to control the degree of smoothness of the derivatives. The chip occupies an area of 9 mm 2 and consumes 34.5 mW, power (Vdd = 5V). The operation of the chip is demonstrated by first presenting results from individual blocks and then from system-level testing. © 2006 IEEE.