Accurate optical flow sensor for obstacle avoidance

Abstract

In this paper, an accurate optical flow sensor based on our previous design is proposed. Improvements are made to make the optical flow sensor more suitable for obstacle avoidance tasks on a standalone FPGA platform. Firstly, because optical flow algorithms are sensitive to the noise, more smoothing units are added into the hardware pipeline to suppress the noise in real video source. These units are hardware efficient to accommodate limited hardware resources. Secondly, a cost function is used to evaluate the estimated motion vector at each pixel for higher level analysis. Experiment results show that the proposed design can substantially improve the optical flow sensor performance for obstacle avoidance applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.